mlafeldt

Good question.

It is true that Google's Disaster Recovery Testing events are also about breaking things on purpose as a means of preparation. However, those events are typically large-scale, company-wide drills targeting not only critical systems but also business processes involving people.

(They even prevent experts from participating to make sure knowledge is spread across the organization. I recommend reading http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2371516 for more.)

As dastbe has pointed out, Chaos Engineering is more about experimenting in a continuous, automated (and hopefully safe) way. Compared to DiRT, experiments are typically smaller in scope, involving fewer people, if any.

I agree with Arcsech in that Chaos Engineering is most useful in the context of distributed systems. However, this doesn't mean that you can't learn something new from experimenting in, say, a local VM.

As a matter of fact, Netflix is running a big distributed system, so that's where they focus their testing efforts. In general, I think it's fair to talk about Chaos Engineering and systems in the general sense, distributed or not.

Yes, we have.

See https://medium.com/production-ready/chaos-monkey-for-fun-and...

As for chaos being a hard sell: https://medium.com/production-ready/chaos-engineering-a-shif...

I recently wrote a blog post on my favorite podcasts:

http://mlafeldt.github.io/blog/podcasts-2015-edition/

Here is the list:

* Beats, Rye & Types (http://beatsryetypes.com/) -- An entertaining podcast about music, food, and programming. I love listening to Michael Bernstein and Aaron Quint, especially when they're talking about Computology and Hip-Hop. A rather interesting mix. Also noteworthy: the only show in the list without a sponsor.

* Home Work (http://5by5.tv/homework) -- A weekly podcast for people who work from home. I'm currently able to telecommute once a week (which is great, by the way). But even if you're not in the position to work from home, this podcast offers many useful tips on productivity, work spaces, tools, and more.

* The Writer Files (http://rainmaker.fm/series/writer/) -- An in-depth look at the "habits, habitats, and brains of a wide spectrum of renowned writers to learn their secrets of productivity and creativity". I care a lot about writing. It's no surprise that I'm interested in the work habits of people who write for a living.

* The Binpress Podcast (http://www.binpress.com/blog/category/podcast/) -- A series of interviews with creators and founders on how they built a business around their digital products. I've always been fascinated by the idea of monetizing (open source) software and creating a sustainable alternative to working for someone else.

* The Changelog (https://changelog.com/podcast/) -- A podcast dedicated to "the intersection of software development and open source" covering a wide variety of topics. I tend to skip most of the episodes on web development, but I listen carefully to anything about Go, Rust, CoreOS, etc. Bonus: The Changelog Weekly newsletter is excellent too.

* Invisible Office Hours (http://invisibleofficehours.com/) -- Hosted by the smart and funny Jason Zook and Paul Jarvis, this podcast includes topics like side projects, launching products, and writing books. I've read all books by Jason and Paul. I also enjoy their weekly newsletters. As I'm writing this, I'm already excited about the third season of their show.

It is true that the only way to get better at writing is to sit down and write. I write at least 250 words each day no matter what. I recently published a blog post on that habit, which you might find helpful as well:

http://mlafeldt.github.io/blog/write-every-day/

The post also received a lot of comments here at HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8350005

Hey, I'm the one who developed the cookbook.

The openssl_x509 resource looks interesting. I'm going to take a look at it. Thanks for the link!

The bash resource works because it uses the system path by default. We actually no longer use that code, but rather install Ruby PPA packages now:

https://github.com/elm-city-craftworks/practicing-ruby-cookb...

-Mathias

I'm the one who co-authored that article with Gregory Brown (@sandal) and wrote the Chef cookbook.

Since the project was great in so many ways, I also shared some additional content on my personal blog today:

http://mlafeldt.github.io/blog/infrastructure-automation-by-...