Thinkst Blog

aka: You know it’s supposed to hurt, you just don’t know which kind of hurt is the good kind One of the common problems when people start lifting weights (or doing CrossFit) is that they inadvertently overdo it. Why don’t they stop when it hurts? Because everyone knows it’s supposed to hurt. Hypertrophy is the goal, so the pain is part of the deal... right? Pain, Guaranteed In an old interview on the rise of Twitter, Ev Williams said something really interesting: in pursuit of the fabled startup we’ve gotten so used to praising the entrepreneurial struggle, and so often repeat the myth of the starving entrepreneur, that people tolerate the pain of a bad/unviable idea longer than they should. He said that seeing Twitter go viral, made it clearer how Odeo hadn’t. When Twitter took off, he just about said: “So this is what traction feels like.” This is an interesting problem. The cult of entrepreneurship is strong and there’s no shortage of glib one-liners pumping people up to worship the...

Moving backward is a feature too! We go through a lot of pain to make sure that Canary deployments are quick and painless. It’s worth remembering that even though the deployment happened in minutes, a bunch of stuff has happened in the background. (Your bird created a crypto key-pair, exchanged the public key with your console, and registered itself as one of your birds). From that point on, all communication between your bird and your console is encrypted (with a per-device key) and goes out via valid DNS requests. This makes sure that deployments are quick and simple, even on complex networks. Once your bird is successfully deployed, it’s completely configurable via your Canary Console. So with a few clicks, a user is able to change a deployed Canary from a Cisco Router, to a Windows Server However mistakes happen and, as anyone who has remotely configured network interfaces over SSH can attest, remote network changes aren’t kind to missteps. How does your Canary react if yo...