Long before “coronavirus” and “social distancing” were part of our vocabulary, PagerDuty set out to rebuild our online community to better serve our members and provide the support necessary to weather tough times like these.
A major goal of DevOps is task and process automation. While total automation is possible to a large extent, DevOps engineers can’t just run a process and then leave it. They need to quickly react in the event of downtime and incidents. Usually, it’s important to react as fast as possible because downtime for even a few minutes can cost from $2,300 to $9,000 according to the Ponemon Institute in 2016 and a 14-hour outrage cost Facebook an estimated $90 million in March 2019.
Nowadays, Slack is often the default choice for an online communication tool in the tech industry. Startups, enterprises, open-source projects - they all use Slack to communicate within their organization but sometimes also with their users and community. Our startup was no different. In this article, I explain what made us look for Slack alternative and what are our impressions after a month of switching to Discord, so you can learn from those before you make your decision.
As of April 15, 2020, Mattermost Extended Support Release (ESR) version 5.9 is no longer supported. If any of your servers are not on ESR 5.19 or later, we highly recommend that you upgrade immediately. With our simple upgrade steps, it takes only a few minutes. Mattermost adopts a monthly tick-tock release cycle, with a new version shipping on the 16th of each month.
On Monday, March 16, 2020, I had the privilege to (virtually) join Shota Gvinepadze and his students at the Free University of Tbilisi and speak about “Advanced Git @ Mattermost” for a portion of their class time. The following are my speaking notes from the session, slightly modified from the original slides for this format. Keep in mind that the command line examples are illustrative of my workflow, and not meant to be run in isolation.
While none could have imagined the global impact the pandemic has had, some healthcare organizations were fortunate to have the right tools before the crisis struck. Ivanti recently hosted a webinar panel discussion with members of Houston’s Kelsey-Seybold Clinic and Houston Methodist, during which IT leaders from these hospitals discussed their rapid transition to remote work.
