Back in August, I took a Customer Success role at Sensu. I’d been familiar with Sensu through my various bits of tinkering and dabbling with monitoring in the past, and was happy to take the role and work with the Sensu team officially. Now that I’ve been working with Sensu for a few months (and am officially on paternity leave for the next several weeks), I decided it was time to revisit the idea of using Sensu to monitor my Kegpi’s various sensors.

I’ve posted previously about homebrewing and have been brewing for almost three years now. Back in April, I took to destroying a perfectly good mini fridge to turn it into a kegerator. As any homebrewer can tell you, bottling is a pain in the ass. The delabling (if you’re reusing bottles), the santization, and the bottle carbonization makes for a rather long and laborious process. Because I’d finally had it with bottling, I decided that kegging would be a wiser choice since:

I’m a bit of a productivity nerd, I’ll admit. Over the last couple of years, I’ve cultivated a workflow that revolved around a lot of OS X tools that I LOVED: Alfred TextExpander iTerm2 These tools were my bread and butter. My professional life, if you will. However, I found myself in a bit of an odd spot in recent months–my MacBook Air was proving to be underpowered for running VM’s, and doing any sort of virtualized anything (which I wanted to be able to do for some training and other projects).

It’s week 3 in the Support Driven Writing Challenge, and this week I’m posting about my thinking space. Let’s start out by establishing that I’m an introvert. I may be a bit of an extroverted introvert, but an introvert nonetheless. So naturally, being around people, or in social situations does not allow me to think easily. I’ll confess that the larger the group of people I’m around, the more taxing it is for me to sort through my thoughts.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I thought I was productive. I used a whiteboard (still do, by the way) for my todo lists, was running a Windows laptop for work, and that worked. When I moved to Texas and started working at Rackspace, things changed…drastically. First, my workload changed, and it changed how I had to approach my workload. I went from a workload that was so full of technical snowflakes (read ‘Unique and one-off issues’) and remote support (me logging into customers’ laptops and desktops), that any sort of automation was useless.

I’ve been trying to up my beer-making game, and remembered that I had a license to BeerSmith2, but didn’t see that they had any packages available for Fedora/Fedora remixes. So, I did a thing and have BeerSmith2 2.3.7 in RPM format. Cheers, Aaron

This post is the last in the Support Driven Writing Challenge series that I’ve been participating in lately, albeit a bit late. This post is about my workspace. As a fellow support driven community member and remote worker Chelsea noted, being remote means that I can work from anywhere. In my case, it’s mostly true (given that I work third shift). My space has been a place that I intentionally crafted to be a place that would make going from a first shift job to a third shift one tolerable, if not at least somewhat enjoyable.

Whew, I’m catching up on posting for the Support Driven Writing Challenge, and I’m fairly caught up at this point. So this week’s post is a ‘Day In the Life’ of whatever it is you do. Since I’m in my first ever third shift position, this should be interesting! The Schedule Before coming to DigitalOcean, I was in a ‘normal’ 9-5 position. Then, I flipped completely over to 3rd shift when I joined DO.

It’s week four of the Support Driven Writing Challenge, and sadly, I’m a bit behind what with the US holiday and the customary food coma. That said, let’s get cracking. The Ubiquitous Ticket Queue I’ll start off by saying that the most common way of supporting our customers at DigitalOcean (from a Customer Success Team standpoint), is via support ticket through our home-grown system. That’s where most of our work comes from, be it customer-initiated tickets, or automated tickets.

I sat down for a bit with a pipe and my banjo. Here’s what I ended up recording: