![\"Movie](\"https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/ash-poster.BcCRRv_G_fJc0o.webp\")
This site used to run on Hugo. As of last week it runs on Astro, and the switch took an evening. Two things about that are worth writing down: why I left, and how the leaving went, because the second one is the part I did not expect.
\nThe honest version of why I left is that I never got comfortable with Hugo. I used it for a couple of years, it worked, it was fast, it never lost a post, and every time I opened the repo it was with a small feeling of dread about what I was going to have to look up to get a post out.
\nThe clearest evidence sat in my own content folder. There was a draft post called “Hugo / Obsidian Blog Workflow”, dated February 2025. Title, date, tags, draft: true, and then nothing. Eighteen months of not writing the post about how comfortable I was with my setup. The workflow I was trying to build just never came together, and nothing else managed to take its place. That is a review in itself, if you are willing to read it as one.
The specifics are unremarkable, which is the point. The site was a third-party theme pulled in as a git submodule, which makes customizing it a negotiation with someone else’s markup. The config was a 152-line YAML file, of which 84 lines were keys with no value on them: blank settings for a theme’s features, sitting in my repo, doing nothing except being things I might be supposed to understand.
\nMy favorite artifact of that file is that comments were turned off, and it still enumerated eight different comment providers. Disqus, DisqusJS, Utterances, Remark42, Waline, Twikoo, Giscus, Gitalk. Eight blank configuration blocks, in version control, for a feature I had disabled. None of which is really Hugo’s fault; it is aimed at people who want that surface area. It is just more machine than I need, and I never built the fluency that would have made it worth it.
\nThe second half is the part I actually want to tell you about, which is that I didn’t really do the migration. Claude did, and what could easily have eaten a month of weekends landed as one commit on a Sunday evening. 191 files, about ten thousand lines added, six hundred deleted. Twelve posts (well, eleven posts and one shameful draft) and three pages carried across, the theme submodule gone, the 152-line config replaced by a src/lib/ directory where the logic is code I can read.
At this point, with AI’s help, speed is a given. The part that surprised me is which work got done because of the speed.
\nThink about migrating a blog by hand. You know the real risk is URLs: search engines and other people’s links point at the old paths, and Hugo was emitting paginated lists, per-tag pages, per-tag feeds and legacy aliases from an even older version of the site. You also know that cataloguing every one of those before you delete them is an hour of tedium standing between you and the fun part. Reader, on a Sunday evening you are not doing that. You are going to eyeball the homepage, click three links, and ship it.
\nWhat happened instead is that Claude audited 73 old URLs that went into a fixture file first, and that became a test that fails if any one stops resolving. Then a crawler that fails on any internal link, image or anchor that does not resolve. Then invariants on the content itself: every tag has a glyph, every post has a hand-written excerpt, no unconverted Hugo shortcodes anywhere. The suite is up to 331 tests, and it runs before every deploy.
\nThat is the leverage that Claude brought. Not the speed directly, the confidence that I could cut over without breaking things. The boring, risk-reducing work is exactly what a motivated human skips at 7pm on a Sunday, and exactly what costs a machine nothing to be thorough about. I got the diligence I would have talked myself out of, and without it I probably would never have made the leap because it felt too risky.
\nThere is a second-order effect too. Once building a small thing properly gets cheap, you build other things you would have put off: a JSON Feed alongside the RSS so the Bluesky cross-poster I also built reads structured data instead of scraping Open Graph tags out of my HTML, a scaffolder for new posts, a search index. None of those were really on a list anywhere, but I had the bandwidth to build them because my comprehension of the minutiae was no longer a blocker.
\nThe stack now is Astro, MDX, static output, on GitLab Pages. The RSS feeds are unchanged, full content and all, because that was the one setting in those 152 lines I actually cared about.
\nI have no thesis about whether you should use Hugo; plenty of people are fluent in it and well served by it. But the tool I could not get comfortable with was costing me momentum on the very task I had brought it in to simplify, and the price of finding out if something else might work better had dropped to one evening.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/liana-s-bE09faNNU0k-unsplash.CNEJKBuz_Z78lcW.jpeg", "date_published": "2026-08-31T18:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Tech", "DevOps" ], "_syndication": { "text": "I never got comfortable with Hugo. I rebuilt on Astro in a few hours, and I was surprised by how Claude helped." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/11/horror-show/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/11/horror-show/", "title": "Telluride Horror Show 2025 Roundup!", "summary": "Sixteen years running and I finally made it to Telluride's horror fest. The standouts, the surprises, and one talk I can't shake.", "content_html": "This year marked my first visit to the Telluride Horror Show, and oh man, what a time! I can’t believe I didn’t know about this before, but I’m so grateful that I do now. It’s been going on for 16 years, and is one of the premiere horror film festivals in the world, right in my back yard! The setting and people were amazing and the programming lived up to the hype.
\nI was really surprised by the non-film events, and one in particular really stuck with me. I have to give a little shoutout to Grady Hendrix’ “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls - LIVE” where he gave an amazing talk on the history and impact of witches and witchcraft throughout history. It was beautiful and emotional and really made me grateful for the witchy women in my life who helped make me who I am. I haven’t been able to find a recording of it anywhere, but if I do, I will link it here in the future.
\nOnto the films! The features are definitely what brought me out to Telluride. I will avoid spoilers and won’t do synopses or anything like that. Instead, I’ll focus on my impressions in general, why they stand out in my memory, and who I think they are most for.\nThis list isn’t a complete accounting of what I saw, just my top few, and there were even more I had to skip. There was no way to see them all. Check out the complete lineup for 2025 to see the full list.
\nThis is one of the bigger titles of the show, and was chosen for the closing screening. The buzz it’s creating is well-earned. I listened to an interview with the director, Chris Stuckmann, and he said the found footage sections were done mostly as a way to stretch the budget, which surprised me. The combination of found footage / mockumentary and traditional storytelling are masterfully intertwined in a way that creates something that I think is entirely new. A great example of constraint pushing us to new places in art. Try to go into this one cold if you can! The trailers even have some light spoilers in them.
\nIf you’re a fan of found footage or supernatural / possession movies, this will probably be something you enjoy. I can’t decide if this or Mother of Flies is my favorite feature of the festival.
\nThe other big buzz creator on my shortlist was Mother of Flies. This is the latest from the Adams Family (John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser), who have fully cemented their place in the history of indie horror with this one. I had heard of them before but this was my first experience of their work. I’m definitely going to be going through their catalog and catching up now!
\nReally well crafted and emotional, this one will appeal to lovers of folk and supernatural horror alike. The world that is created here is enthralling, with clear ties to real folklore but also creating new lore to play with.
\nI couldn’t stop thinking about It Ends after seeing it. It’s beautifully crafted, interesting, and has some great performances in it. It’s definitely weird, and eschews a lot of expectations about what a “movie” should do. I found it really striking, and I think it will find a huge cult following. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a broad release.
\nThis one just barely counts as a horror movie in my mind, and if I had to pick a sub-genre I would put it in Cosmic or Existential horror. If you enjoy your horror coming in the form of creeping dread that may not reach a big climax, you’ll enjoy It Ends. I personally can’t wait to see what this team does next, especially director Alexander Ullom.
\nBlood Shine squarely hits all my major flavor centers. Isolation, cults, gore. One of the most visually beautiful films I saw this weekend, it has continued to linger in my mind for weeks after seeing it. It’s a great example of how even a small movie can have a big impact.
\nI hope Blood Shine gets picked up by Shudder or another streamer like that because more people deserve to see it! If you are into folk or religious horror it will be right up your alley. The creators, Emily Bennett & Justin Brooks, have earned a permanent place on my “ones to watch” list going forward with this one.
\nI was skeptical of yet another zombie movie, but with big names attached (starring Daisy Ridley and directed by Zak Hilditch) I decided to set my skepticism aside and check it out anyway, and I’m glad I did. They take the base concept in a few interesting directions. I particularly liked that the zombies are created by a singular event rather than a disease or toxin so there’s no risk of infection. It makes the story feel more like a natural disaster response than a survival horror. That fresh angle, combined with the personal story at its core, should keep even non-horror fans engaged.
\nI fully expect We Bury the Dead to get a wide release, and when it does, it’s well worth the time.
\nShorts are often hard to find outside the festivals, so I made sure to catch as many as I could, even if it meant missing a feature I was interested in. Of the shorts I saw these are the ones that I most want to revisit, though there were many many more that I really enjoyed. I’ll keep my blurbs on them minimal since they so often rely on getting in one good gut-punch, so I don’t want to accidentally blunt that.
\nDirected by Brady Richards. Easily my favorite short of the festival, and contains maybe my favorite overall moment too. I had a chance to have a conversation with Brady (who also is an organizer for the festival) which was a lot of fun. After being involved with the Horror Show for some years he thought, “Hey, maybe I can do this too” and I think he did a great job. I hope he does more!
\nDirected by Charlie Schwan. The log line from the lineup is “A woman forms a pact with a dark entity in exchange for a glimpse into her tormented past.”, and I’ll just leave it at that. If you get a chance to see this, do it!
\nDirected by Dan Abramovici. This really has the feel of something that could be fleshed out into a feature. I really hope someday it is. We only get a glimpse of something that I’m sure has a lot of story built up behind it, and I’m eager for more.
\nDirected by Kiggs. Great little snippet of a Swedish folk tale that is perfectly paced. From the moment it starts you know where it’s going to go and the build up to the inevitable end is delightful.
\nDirected by Louise Flaherty. A fascinating stop-motion story that seems inspired by Inuit folk tales. I loved it not only for the quality of the production, but also for bringing a new story and perspective.
\nDirected by Béla Baptiste. A great little shocker in the best tradition of gonzo shorts. You can tell they knew exactly what they wanted to do, and their execution was perfect!
\nDirected by Grace Presse. A tight little gross-out scare that left me wanting more. Don’t watch before bed!
\nI see that the dates for 2026 have already been announced, October 16-18, and I’ve already got my calendar blocked. This is definitely going to become a high point of my year.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/horror-hero.-D3XFzZx_Z1lPtYe.jpeg", "date_published": "2025-11-16T17:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Film", "Horror" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Sixteen years running and I finally made it to Telluride's horror fest. The standouts, the surprises, and one talk I can't shake." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/04/tough-calls/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/04/tough-calls/", "title": "Tough Times Ask for Tough Calls", "summary": "Sometimes the risky move is the right move.", "content_html": "A couple months ago, I sold my Tesla stock and used the earnings from that sale to make donations to the EFF and ACLU. At the time, it felt like it was a bit of a dumb financial move, but it wasn’t much money and I was sure it would help me sleep at night, so I did it anyway. Turns out I did sleep better, and I sold real close to the peak of Tesla’s stock price, so go me. Also, suck it Elon. This week, I’m making another move that feels really similar, but an awful lot bigger.
\nSince starting my own consultancy two years ago, one of my primary contracts has been with a company that, among other things, manufactures military equipment and weapons. I’ve never been fully comfortable with this, but in the past I’ve been able to rationalize my choice pretty easily. I’m pretty far removed from that work, just helping with IT systems that support the business at large. Even though the systems I help make better DO facilitate the creation of these weapons, I could tell myself that between my remove from them and the fact that they were likely to be used in ethical ways, my hands were clean enough.
\nI started getting the ick with how the Biden administration was continuing to support Israel even though their response to the October 7th attacks pretty clearly came to constitute war crimes as they escalated. That can be a tough topic, but my stance on it is pretty simple. War crimes are bad, no matter who does them, and we shouldn’t be supporting countries that commit them. But, again, I was able to justify my continued involvement by balancing that against the support the administration gave Ukraine. Here, these weapons were helping a free people stand against an unjust aggressor. By my reckoning, that is the clearest definition of an ethical use of these kinds of weapons. I have no way to know if any of the weapons used in either of these conflicts were made with the support of systems I had a hand in shaping, but odds are very good some were. On balance I felt like things were still ok enough for me to continue, even though we were making some really significant mistakes as a nation.
\nBut now, we have very different leaders, whose collective inner voices executed a suicide pact a couple decades ago. For the last 6 weeks or so especially I’ve really been struggling with focus and productivity and I’d been just chalking it up to the general stresses of living through 2025 as a leftist progressive. Watching so much of the progress we’d made as a society towards compassion and justice get callously demolished is demoralizing. Seeing the masks truly come off our business and political leaders; seeing just how craven and cowardly they are is heartbreaking. Especially in a time where it’s become clear that hard work and good faith has little connection to success. The only reliable predictors for that seem to be “have no moral compass” and “be rich already”, and seeing that embodied so vividly at the highest levels of our society wears on a person. I figured I was just burning out a bit. But recently I realized it’s more specific than that.
\nSomeone in a meeting said something to the effect of, “We need to make sure the missile floor can stay running 24/7” and that statement just shook me. Images of a factory spitting out missiles all day and night for 47 to put to use because I helped make their computer systems reliable enough to do that rolled around in my head for days. I was kinda paralyzed as I wrestled with intrusive thoughts tied back to that off-the-cuff comment. That’s what made me realize I had to make a change, I had to get out.
\nSo, I’m exiting the project. It will be tough financially. I’ve relied on this project for over half my income for the last couple of years, it really has been a cornerstone of my fledgling business. I’ve done work there I’m genuinely proud of. But not anymore. I had already set a goal for myself to become less reliant on this contract this year and start making moves to slowly shift away from it. Well, so much for slow.
\nNow, I have no illusions that this will actually change anything. My departure will at most be mildly annoying to the people I’m directly working with. Those missiles and whatever else will still be made. If the administration decides to use them to intentionally target innocent people, or sell them to some other dictator to commit war crimes, or escalate a conflict that sparks World War Three, that will still happen. I fully believe that the current leadership of the United States wouldn’t hesitate to do any of those things if they believed it could somehow be turned to serve their personal interest. I’m not moving the needle at the high level. But that’s not the point. The point is to reduce my emotional burden and create more space for me.
\nIf all this move does is allow me to be a little bit happier, that will be enough. Maybe though it will allow me to apply my expertise to some other project that will move the needle in a truly meaningful way. The point is though that this is another step towards better aligning my professional life with my personal values.
\nIt also highlights that not every piece of resistance has to be all-caps RESISTANCE. There are a lot of quotes from a lot of smart people that are along the line of “I won’t let the fact I can’t do everything interfere with my ability to do something”. I put this move in that bucket. It might be a small thing in the big picture, but it is something. Who knows though? It may turn out to be the key decision that does actually does change everything for me, there’s no way to know!
\nIs there something nagging at you? Something in your heart of hearts you wish you were doing different to be living your values more truthfully? Do it. I know it’s scary. I’m scared, but doing scary things is how we become who we’re supposed to be. This might be a stupid move financially, but I know I’ll sleep better at night.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/tough-calls.DB1-OUJg_Z2w82xu.jpeg", "date_published": "2025-04-22T10:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Politics", "Life" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Sometimes the risky move is the right move." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/03/review-weds-ash/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/03/review-weds-ash/", "title": "Review Wednesday: ASH", "summary": "Flying Lotus opens with a first act I'd have followed anywhere. Then the movie decides to explain itself.", "content_html": "
Going into the movie I knew I liked Flying Lotus’ music, but I hadn’t seen any of his other directorial work. I knew I liked the style of his videos that were directed by others though, so I expected that influence to come through, and I was not disappointed in the first act.
\nThe movie opened with some great vibrant visuals and music that immediately brought to mind Blood Machines, and I was getting ready for a real visual and music-heavy vibe-fest like that. Gaspar Noé is a creator that Flying Lotus has mentioned as an influence, so I was getting real dialed in for something I can get lost in with just some nods to tradtional story telling to tie it together. Through most of a first act full of amazing sights and sounds, including some top-notch practical work, I was fully onboard. The space suit design especially really stood out.
\nHowever, not long after our main character Riya (Eiza González) wakes up and starts getting her bearings, that vibe starts to fade into the background. Once Brion (Aaron Paul) arrives the vibe is fully in the back seat of the film, which becomes a more standard “figure out what’s going on here and stay alive” semi-procedural that felt disappointingly standard after such an interesting start.
\nIn fact, most of the second and third acts felt like someone from the studio reminded Flying Lotus that he was supposed to be making a “regular movie”, and he grudgingly agreed, spending most of the screen time awkwardly navigating his way out of narrative corners he’d painted himself into, only occasionally letting the vibe-monster out of the trunk. Unfortunately, those short trips into vibes-ville just make the mess worse, and the attempts to hold the story together feel even more awkward.
\nTo get back on the rails, the movie falls victim to some ungainly story telling techniques, the worst of which being “lets retell the first act but show what really happened” followed by “omniscient villain exposition to fill in the gaps”, and finally the “incongruous dream sequence to justify a logical leap”. If they couldn’t figure out a way to weave these bits in along the way more smoothly I honestly would have preferred to leave many of these questions unanswered as that would have ultimately been a more satisfying experience. There is one treat in the third act in the form of some great practical effects work in the final confrontation though, which was truly a remarkable sequence.
\nDespite the clunky third act though, I found a lot to enjoy in ASH, I just wish that it would have more firmly decided what it wanted to be from the jump and committed to it. If it was going to be mostly a mixed-media art piece, eschewing traditional story telling for beautiful music and visuals to tell the sketch of a story with vibes, I wish it would have really embraced that. If it was going to be a more standard movie, I wish it would have spent less time and effort on the art vibes, and instead spending those resources tightening up the film-making fundamentals so that it wouldn’t have gotten so lost in the third act.
\nI struggle to recommend seeing it in the theatre, even though I’m glad I did. The sights and sounds when they are at their best really deserve to be experienced there. However, I just don’t think it really delivers enough to justify the price of admission unless you are Flying Lotus superfan. If not, probably wait for the Shudder release. On streaming though, it’s well worth your time if you’re a fan of horror sci-fi. It’s a mess, but it’s a beautiful mess. I have dreams of doing a triple-header of Color out of Space, ASH, and Blood Machines. I think that would be some real fun, and the three of them all fit together for me somehow.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/ash-hero.Djw_TaeL_Z1bPlmd.jpeg", "date_published": "2025-03-26T18:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Horror", "Film", "Review Wednesday", "Sci-Fi" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Flying Lotus opens with a first act I'd have followed anywhere. Then the movie decides to explain itself." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/03/information-flows-in-3-cultures/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/03/information-flows-in-3-cultures/", "title": "Information Flow in Three Work Cultures", "summary": "Three work cultures, and what actually moves through each of them.", "content_html": "This article is an entry in a topic I’m calling Reprints, where I’m collecting works that I have written in the past but published on other platforms in an effort to collect my work into a single place. Wherever possible I will be linking to currently available locations online of the original publications. In all cases there will be what I consider to be appropriate attribution and usage within either my explicit rights or Fair Use. If you think I’ve misstepped, please contact me.
\nThis piece was originally written while I worked at Guild and published in August of 2020 on their Extra Credit tech blog.
\nArt by Erin Rhodes.
\nNothing defines a group of people more than its culture. More than anything else, culture shapes what it feels like to be a part of that group. “Culture” is an expansive concept, and can include everything from the most foundational beliefs and major ceremonies of a group, to the most mundane little details of daily life. Art, music, food, speech patterns, clothing, architecture… the list could go on. But what does culture mean in a business context? What is your culture at work? How does the culture at work affect your ability to work?
\nWork cultures are distinct from other cultures in that they are much more narrowly focused, and are often created with a lot of intention. If culture in general describes how a group lives, culture in business describes how a group works. A lot of scholarly effort has been put into studying and defining work culture. One of the most useful models of organizational culture was put forth by Ron Westrum in his 2004 paper “A Typology of Organisational Cultures,” where he defines the three cultures model. The cultures are pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. Westrum found that one of the most telling attributes about the dominant culture is how the people and processes within an organization handle information. Especially telling is the handling of information about failures, flaws, weaknesses, or other shortcomings. Let’s call this Toxic Information.
\nA pathological culture is as negative as it sounds. This culture is focused primarily on the acquisition and retention of power by individuals within the organization. One of the primary means to maintain this power is to control the flow of information, especially Toxic Information. In a pathological culture, Toxic Information is frequently weaponized. It is used against others in the organization to ensure the person who has the information maintains their power.
\nIt’s also common in a pathological culture for information to be suppressed. When it can’t be suppressed, a scapegoat is found to “take the fall” for the organization. This results in a large number of other negative behaviors, including low cooperation, blame, siloing information, hiding failures, and fear of innovation. These traits are particularly dangerous for creative work like software development. They encourage people to always choose the “safe” paths, which hinders innovation. They create adversarial social patterns between teams, which leads to infighting, and known problems getting ignored until they cause issues in production.
\nStrongly pathological organizations can be effective for short periods of time so long as they pay very well or have some other amazing upside for the individuals, but people tend to become unhappy and burn out or become disengaged quickly. As a result, these organizations tend to have high turnover rates, and there is a strong correlation with markers for corruption. In fact, organizations that go too far down this road often collapse because they are held together only by individual self-interest, and fundamental problems are rarely addressed.
\nA Bureaucratic culture, on the other hand, focuses primarily on rules. Almost every large organization has some element of bureaucracy in its culture. Virtually any time you see a standard form, or have to look up a process, you’re seeing bureaucracy in action. Some amount of it is necessary, even healthy, for organizations to scale efficiently. However, there are pitfalls. Bureaucracy can often lead to “not my problem” attitudes because areas of responsibility are very narrowly defined. Communication between groups is often limited, and sometimes discouraged. This can be because an “us vs them” attitude has arisen because people have begun to identify with their immediate coworkers, but not the organization as a whole. It can also be because the “proper channels” for that communication are too onerous. The novel or interesting tend to be actively discouraged because change of any kind is seen as too risky. Individuals are disempowered to make decisions unless they are formally part of the leadership group. All this leads to Toxic Information being ignored or shuffled from place to place, allowing problems to go unaddressed for extended periods of time.
\nBureaucracies also tend to be strongly justice seeking. When Toxic Information does finally come to light, they will not generally try to suppress it or dodge responsibility, but they will be quick to find some form of punishment or restitution to execute “justice.” This leads to a feeling that the issue is “dealt with,” but will often fail to address the root problem. Perhaps worse, bureaucratic thinking will cause people to be overly reliant on “proper channels” in a crisis. Westrum points to the communication failures between police and firefighters responding to the September 11th attacks as a catastrophic example of this force in action.
\nBureaucracies can be very effective, however. A great example of this is a military organization. Most world class militaries are very effective at meeting their objectives, but most of the people who are there aren’t performing creative work, and relatively few of them are likely to be happy enough to stay there long term. Their biggest weakness, though, is their inability to adapt and act efficiently. The often onerous process to get changes approved takes time and effort away from actually implementing those changes. This is not a good environment for developing software, where the pace of change is constantly accelerating.
\nFinally, generative cultures are fundamentally mission and performance focused. The high-level goals of the organization are clearly articulated, and individuals are empowered within their spheres to contribute to that mission. Cooperation and collaboration are encouraged. Novel ideas and experiments that are likely paths to better outcomes are encouraged. Most importantly, Toxic Information isn’t seen as toxic at all: it’s an opportunity for improvement. As a result, strongly generative organizations will actively seek out Toxic Information as a means of self-improvement. When Toxic Information surfaces, they will look for contributing factors and work for true fixes to underlying problems. Justice seeking, scapegoating, and suppression should all be very rare, and ideally, entirely absent.
\nPeople in generative cultures tend to be happier on average than in other cultures because they can clearly connect their work to the higher goals of the organization and are empowered to make a difference. This clearly is the best environment for creative work like software development, but it’s not without its risks. The biggest challenge in a generative culture is scaling it to large numbers of people. As people know each other less, trust is more difficult to maintain, communication is less frequent, and efficiency can be lost as people lose track of what others are doing and overlapping work starts happening.
\nAt Guild we’re working towards a strongly generative culture, even in the face of our rapid growth. Not only does this cultural model provide for the healthiest and happiest environment for the people that inhabit it, but there are also strong correlations between generative attributes and effective organizations. We’ve already established that the handling of Toxic Information is a strong indicator for the kind of culture that exists in an organization, but it goes beyond that. The way that all information flows is important. In a generative culture there is a strong emphasis on getting the right information to the right people at the right time. That is a challenge at the best of times, and in an organization that is growing as rapidly as Guild is, that challenge is magnified.
\nAt the highest level, Guild is meeting that challenge with a focus on transparency and candor. Frequent communications about the state of the business, progress on initiatives, and upcoming challenges are all topics one can expect to see. But several less obvious efforts within the technology organization also promote a generative culture.
\nThe establishment of the QA, Security, and DevOps teams this year are prime examples of organizational changes that have deep cultural importance. On the surface, these teams are centers of specialized skills and considerations that are fundamental parts of building and delivering software, but they are also key actors in facilitating information flow and cooperation across teams.
\nDevOps is most directly and obviously engaged in helping information move around and fostering cooperation. It’s right in our team mission statement. We spend a large portion of our time interacting with developers from all over the company, supporting their work around automation, observability, and infrastructure. We bring our own skills to the table, helping squads make stronger and more consistent decisions, more quickly. Our goal here is to be a super responsive first line of support to get developers unblocked. But we would be making a big mistake to think we have all the answers. We are also collaborating with the individual dev squads. We are collecting good ideas that we find in one squad and sharing them where they might be useful on another. Sometimes, we even integrate them into our core patterns. The observability efforts that we are shepherding are entirely about surfacing the right information to the right people at the right time.
\nQA’s role here is also pretty obvious. I know the joke is that all QA does is find creative ways to break things, but really, it’s about making developers aware of ways the software we create might not do what we expect. Ideally, it also creates that awareness as quickly and easily as possible using sophisticated testing and automation tools. The benefit of focus here is twofold: we have better awareness of flaws, and we can spend less total effort finding them. Once the problems are found, QA also makes sure that loops get closed with the project managers and devs who own that code so that decisions can be made about how and when to address the issues.
\nSecurity helps information flow through auditing and compliance efforts. The relationship here isn’t obvious, but it becomes apparent if you dig below the surface a bit. Audits are fundamentally about discovering where we can be better, and compliance compares us to recognized standards for good processes and practices. When we’re proactive about compliance and can show evidence that we meet these standards when partners ask for it, we protect ourselves from disruptive audits being imposed on us and we make it easier to get contracts for new deals signed. Our security team is also engaged in this effort through a formal Application Security program that is being spun up. At its core, the program aims to ensure that developers know about secure coding best practices and that they are warned about possible vulnerabilities in their code before it makes it into production.
\nIt takes a lot of work to create an organization with a great culture. There are countless aspects to be considered, but perhaps the most important one is how the organization handles information, especially information we’ve called Toxic Information. Is it hoarded to be used as a weapon for personal gain? Is it hindered by bureaucratic roadblocks? Or, does information flow freely to where it’s needed when it’s needed? The latter is what we’re aiming for at Guild. It’s a major component of a generative culture, where people are happy and the organization is able to meet the high-level goals at the heart of its mission. Information flow is only one part of what it takes to get there, though. What else can you do in your role, with your teammates, to get your organization closer to that strongly generative ideal?
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/four_people.BbMCCqhG_1AM62c.jpeg", "date_published": "2025-03-10T06:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Reprints", "Tech", "Culture" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Three work cultures, and what actually moves through each of them." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/02/more-than-commit-deploy/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/02/more-than-commit-deploy/", "title": "CI/CD: More Than Commit -> Deploy", "summary": "The pipeline is the easy part. CI/CD is a set of cultural commitments that happen to produce a deployment.", "content_html": "This article is an entry in a topic I’m calling Reprints, where I’m collecting works that I have written in the past but published on other platforms in an effort to collect my work into a single place. Wherever possible I will be linking to currently available locations online of the original publications. In all cases there will be what I consider to be appropriate attribution and usage within either my explicit rights or Fair Use. If you think I’ve misstepped, please contact me.
\nThis piece was originally written while I worked at Guild and published in April of 2020 on their Extra Credit tech blog.
\nPhoto by Pablo Lancaster Jones on Unsplash
\nCI/CD is a central topic of DevOps. Usually, “CI/CD” is understood to mean “Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment”. Its importance to DevOps adoption projects has led to the creation of dozens of tools designed to make that process easier. There’s lots of nuance and detail that should be part of this process, but unfortunately it’s frequently simplified down to “Commit Code -> Deploy Build”, and therein lies the danger.
\nMany people see that simplified process as the pinnacle of DevOps value, but lumping it all together like that can lead to problems later as your organization works to mature their DevOps practice. Why is that?
\nCI can be described as the process which consumes freshly committed code and runs a variety of tests and performs a “build”. Depending on the technologies involved and the maturity of the practice the details can vary widely, but at a high level, that’s pretty much it.
\nCD is the next step in the process, wherein that fresh build is deployed into a server environment so people can use it. Usually, this is a testing environment of some kind so the changes can be validated beyond whatever validation is done during the CI process, followed by a deployment into production.
\nTreating these two separate concerns as a single process prevents either of them from being as efficient or flexible as they should be. What happens when you need to move that code to another environment? In most cases, the answer is to merge those changes into another branch which will deploy there. But why would we do that? We should already have that code built and tested, why do we need to do that work and spend that time again?
\nHow do we know for certain that the tests we performed in one environment accurately reflect what we can expect when the code is merged, rebuilt, and redeployed in another environment? If we have good automation we can be pretty sure it will be the same, but there is a chance that the merge and rebuild process could introduce changes that weren’t there before. This is especially true on teams where there are many people working fast on parallel projects. Why would we allow this risk to exist in processes that are supposed to be reducing risk as they progress?
\nThis extra effort and risk can be significantly reduced by logically separating CI from CD, and treating them as separate processes. The most straightforward way to do that is to have the CI process create an artifact of some kind, which is then consumed by the CD process. This artifact could be a container image, a webpack, a serverless code archive, or any number of other kinds of packages that wrap up software. Whatever form it takes, the creation of this software artifact allows us to decouple the CI process from the CD process, which lets us do some pretty amazing things during CD.
\nIt gives us much improved confidence that what we are currently deploying is the very same thing that we had previously tested. It allows us to “shift left” the risk and effort of code merges. It allows deploys to downstream environments to be faster because we’re not repeating the CI process when we don’t need to. It allows us to easily deploy the same code in multiple environments, or easily re-task an environment for testing different things by deploying a different version of some code to it. It allows us to adopt tooling around deployment that can be easily used by non-developers, eliminating developers as a bottleneck for deployments and moving the decision of “what should be where” closer to people who focus on business concerns. This list could continue, but that should illustrate well the benefits of decoupling CD from CI.
\nThe benefits don’t stop in CD though! If we don’t have to run the CI process as often and have it be a blocker for CD, the cost of the time it takes is reduced. This gives us the space to add more thorough automated tests to the CI process, which can give us even more confidence in the build and reduce the need for manual QA later in the process.
\nI really believe in the value of separating concerns. If processes are designed to create bright lines or explicit handoffs between areas of concern, it makes the overall process much more powerful. Separating CI from CD is a great example of that effect, and one that I hope we will embrace at Guild as we progress in our DevOps journey. If you’d like to learn more about this space, check out Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble, it’s an amazing resource!
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/brownies.BbX7Cy1E_Z9bicw.jpeg", "date_published": "2025-02-24T07:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Reprints", "Tech", "DevOps" ], "_syndication": { "text": "The pipeline is the easy part. CI/CD is a set of cultural commitments that happen to produce a deployment." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/02/review-weds-the-ward/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/02/review-weds-the-ward/", "title": "Review Wednesday: The Ward", "summary": "Carpenter steps into a form a I don't expect from him.", "content_html": "Another busy week, and so another repost from the distant past of Feeding The Machine. So, here’s a review of the horror movie The Ward. Originally posted November 2011
\n![\"Movie](\"https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/the_ward_poster.B6-PlaiR_2qoHaT.webp\")
The movie follows Kristen, who is captured by police and sent to The Ward early on, after an unexplained and intriguing chase through the forest that ends with her burning down an isolated farmhouse. Once captured, we follow her and her far-too-pretty to be believable ward-mates as she tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to Alice, a ghost that is haunting the ward. Her “friends” seem to know something about what is going on, but are reluctant to help.
\nMost of the horror stuff that Carpenter is known for (as either a writer or director) tends towards the slasher-flick. The obvious example of course is Halloween and its many descendants. The Ward, on the other hand, is much more psychological thriller than slasher, at least until the very end. Up until the last fifteen minutes or so, there’s the constant sense of wrongness and building dread, but not much in the way of big scares or gore. The story is interesting, the characters easy to get involved with, and the pacing is good for the most part. I found the final confrontations with the ghost of Alice to be a little formulaic though, almost boring. Luckily, the denouement of the story and final scenes more than make up for any mis-steps that lead up to them.
\nI’d give The Ward a strong recommend for fans of horror or psychological thrillers.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/the_ward_poster_2.Dvi4MwXt_XM3gn.jpeg", "date_published": "2025-02-19T07:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Review Wednesday", "Horror", "Film" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Carpenter steps into a form a I don't expect from him." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/02/dangerous-appeal-of-absolutism/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2025/02/dangerous-appeal-of-absolutism/", "title": "The Dangerous Appeal of Absolutism", "summary": "Maximalist openness is a policy that quietly assumes nobody will take advantage. They will.", "content_html": "I use Airgradient air quality sensors in a couple places in my home to keep my eye on indoor air quality. One of the reasons I chose them is their open approach to data sharing. I got a note from them this week asking my opinion on how they should handle a situation where another org they work with is refusing to share data in a similar way. They’ve detailed things in a blog post if you want to get the nitty gritty.
\nIt got me thinking though that Airgradient got themselves into that situation because they took a maximalist approach to openness, and didn’t think through additional controls that might be needed if they cared about whether or not someone else didn’t “play nice” in a way that they implicitly were saying they expected them to. They just assumed that other folks wouldn’t take advantage of them. To be clear, I think Airgradient will navigate this well, and in this case it’s not a particularly sticky situation, it’s just the thing that got me thinking.
\nThis kind of thing comes up frequently in Open Source. A particularly ugly version of this is playing out in the Wordpress community as I write this, and shows no signs of wrapping up anytime soon.
\nTaking a maximally open stance like this is appealing in its’ simplicity, but I would argue that kind of position is almost always wrong. To actually achieve the goals that a maximally transparent, open, or socially-beneficial position is trying to achieve controls need to be put in place to curb the actions of bad actors.
\nIt’s why open social communities need conduct guidelines to keep hate speech at bay. It’s why capitalism needs regulations to keep abusers of all kinds under control. It’s why Open Source licenses continue to proliferate and get increasingly nuanced. The need for being explicit about things that it may have been safe to make assumptions about in the past has never been more clear.
\nIt’s really a systems design problem at the end of the day, and looking around right now I can see the problems with the design of our social systems cast in particularly frightening relief. It’s clear that there were a whole lot of assumptions about how people in power would behave underpinning the design of our most important social and governmental systems, and that capture at the scale that we’re experiencing simply wouldn’t happen.
\nAs we’re trying to hold the existing systems together to keep people safe and healthy, it’s important to be thinking about the non-obvious design assumptions that are embedded in our systems, and how we can avoid those problems when we get the chance to build what comes next. Don’t fall into the trap of the toxic appeal of a simple and maximalist position. It will almost certainly not do what you hope.
\nGood luck out there.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/dangerous_treasure.Cj0KuStn_HA4yv.jpeg", "date_published": "2025-02-16T23:14:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Tech", "Internet", "Culture" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Maximalist openness is a policy that quietly assumes nobody will take advantage. They will." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/review-weds-blood-machines/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/review-weds-blood-machines/", "title": "Review Wednesday: Blood Machines", "summary": "90-ish minutes of R-rated horror music video with amazing darksynth tunes. The plot is thin, and I couldn't care less.", "content_html": "![\"Movie](\"https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/bloodmachines-poster.Doig8BJ5_1GUDgn.webp\")
The visual style had elements of Giger and Cronenberg blended with Warhammer 40k and soaked in a vapor wave color palette that blends perfectly with the music and gritty mood of the world that the filmmmakers have created. The ship and weapon designs especially grabbed me, and made it clear that technology in this universe is more organic than what we’re used to. More of a tryptich art piece than a traditional film or series, it also made me think of what might happen if Gaspar Noé were more interested in something a bit more pulpy and action-oriented than what he usually takes on. There were several scenes that reminded me of Climax or Lux Æterna, but not quite so concerned with being considered capital-A Art as those films are.
\nAll-in-all, Blood Machines was tons of fun for the hour or so it took to watch through all three short episodes. If your idea of a good time is something that could be compared to an R-rated Daft Punk video, then you should check it out. Currently streaming on Shudder.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/bloodmachines-hero.yhyA7lyp_19caEU.jpeg", "date_published": "2023-09-27T21:33:04.000Z", "tags": [ "Review Wednesday", "Film", "Horror", "Sci-Fi" ], "_syndication": { "text": "90-ish minutes of R-rated horror music video with amazing darksynth tunes. The plot is thin, and I couldn't care less." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/review-weds-someone-comes-to-town/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/review-weds-someone-comes-to-town/", "title": "Review Weds: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town", "summary": "Doctorow's weirdest book is about the son of a mountain and a washing machine. Somehow it works.", "content_html": "In celebration of getting Feeding The Machine going again, and to get back in the habit of regularly posting, I’m going to re-post my review of what is still one of my favorite pieces of fiction from Cory Doctorow. Originally written in November 2011
\n![\"Book](\"https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/someone-US-cover-large.BPdKWoIW_ZPtbFr.webp\")
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (shortened to just Someone from here on out) is the first fiction by Cory Doctorow that I have read. It is a bizarre story about a man who is often called Alan, though that’s not his name, who is the son of a mountain and washing machine. If that sounds odd to you, that’s ok, it is odd. And that’s only the beginning. In fact, Cory himself calls the book his “weirdest book by far“. It also, however, is a lot of fun.
\nCory exists on an ephemeral list that I call “Smart People Who Do Smart Things That I Respect”. It’s a list I keep meaning to actually write down. He’s on it primarily because of his activities in the Free Software and Free Culture realms. He also seems to have fairly sane political views, which is a cherry on top for eligibility for The List. I’ve read a lot of his non-fiction stuff and it’s all smart, concise, and accessible. In short, I like him. After I finished Burn, I dove back into Aldiko’s Creative Commons section, and came up with this. Like movies, I tend to stay pretty ignorant about books until I’m actually looking for something to read, usually just gravitating to genres and authors I know I like and picking something up on the spur of the moment. That is how I found Someone.
\nThe book bounces around in time, back and forth from Alan’s childhood and the “present day” of his adulthood. Present Alan has just moved into a new house, filled it with shelves that he’s filled with books and other curios, and intends to sit down to write a book. He never gets to the book though, derailed by the abuses of nefarious neighbor Krishna, infatuation with the classic girl-next-door Mimi (who has wings), the techno pipe-dreams of anarchist friend Kurt, and the arrival of his Matryoska doll brothers Edward, and Frederick. They show up on his doorstep early on in the story to report that Gregory (the smallest of the set) is missing, and they fear that their psychotic brother Davey has returned from the dead to seek revenge. This is particularly distressing for E and F, because without G, they cannot eat.
\nFrom there, the story runs away with Alan as he tries to solve the mystery of Gregory’s disappearance and deal with the repercussions of Davey’s return. It’s well crafted, entertaining, and the weirdness soon falls away and you come to accept the realities of this world. The flashbacks to Alan’s youth where he meets his first love are particularly endearing and heartbreaking. As are his interactions with his brothers.
\nThe one major complaint I have about the book has to do with the parts involving the creation of the wireless mesh network with his cyberpunk buddy Kurt. The project serves as a means to bring the two together and to move their relationship forward, but the technical explanations of things feel heavy-handed and out of place. It could be that they are talking about things I understand already, so the information covered didn’t add anything for me, but it really felt like a kludgy delivery. It was almost as if Doctorow finished the story and then said to himself, “But wait! I’m known for all my techy and free culture stuff! I have to stick that in there somewhere!”, and then proceeded to bolt on those pieces after the fact. If I were king, I would have kept the concept of the mesh network project since it was genuinely interesting and served as a good engine for moving the story forward in a number of ways, but ditched the overbearing technobabble exposition. It just didn’t add the to story. In fact, the first instance of this happens relatively early, before I was used to the weirdness of it all, and the two together were almost enough to drive me away. I’m glad I didn’t stop as I really enjoyed the rest of the book. I fear though that many people will get to that point, their eyes will glaze over, and they will miss out on a really great tale because they put it aside prematurely.
\nBottom line, go read it, and try not to get too hung up on the oddly placed techy details. 4/5
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/someone-US-cover-large-crop.CSmT0H9K_6YLkX.jpeg", "date_published": "2023-09-20T18:21:20.000Z", "tags": [ "Review Wednesday", "Sci-Fi", "Books" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Doctorow's weirdest book is about the son of a mountain and a washing machine. Somehow it works." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/enshittification-of-game-dev/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/enshittification-of-game-dev/", "title": "The Enshittification of Game Dev", "summary": "Unity decided to charge developers per install and the internet lost it. The other shoe everyone saw coming, right on schedule.", "content_html": "Whew. It’s been a week. Unity announced their new pricing model and, boy, the internet was not happy about it.
\nIf you haven’t been paying attention, the long and the short of it is that Unity has decided to change the terms of their license agreement such that the more “successful” a game is, the more the developer will owe Unity. The (biggest, but far from only) trouble is that the size of that debt is determined by “installs”, which is apparently being used as a proxy for sales. I’ll write about what I think of metric proxies at some point, but suffice it to say that this is a particularly problematic proxy. Especially in the age of F2P games.
\nI’ve been waiting for them to do something like this ever since their IPO and they hired that guy from EA just a few years later. If I’m being really honest, I’m mostly surprised it took this long for the other shoe to drop. It struck me though that Unity is entering the final phase of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification process. Unity really is following the script to a T.
\nYou can see the arc of Unity’s history in detail on Wikipedia, but to summarize:
\nIt’s such a perfect example of the enshittification cycle you’d think they did it on purpose. This article points out that their growth has been tanking which has whacked their stock valuation. This is likely what pushed them to try to grab more revenue. Late stage capitalism rearing it’s ugly head yet again. Another great thing is getting destroyed because investors demand infinite growth so they can get their infinite payouts. Speaking of payouts and maybe doing it all on purpose, it seems like our aforementioned CEO unloaded a bunch of stock right before this announcement. Almost as if he knew this move was going to turn the company into the titular PoS, but decided to do it anyway.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/_astro/head-removed.IG1t1IET_7uOX7.jpeg", "date_published": "2023-09-15T01:49:34.000Z", "tags": [ "Tech", "Gaming", "Internet" ], "_syndication": { "text": "Unity decided to charge developers per install and the internet lost it. The other shoe everyone saw coming, right on schedule." } }, { "id": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/frist-psot/", "url": "https://feedingthemachine.com/posts/2023/09/frist-psot/", "title": "Frist Psot", "summary": "Is this thing on? Feeding The Machine comes back from a long hiatus.", "content_html": "Is this thing on?
\nAfter a long hiatus Feeding The Machine is coming back.
", "image": "https://feedingthemachine.com/og-default.png", "date_published": "2023-09-15T01:29:40.000Z", "tags": [], "_syndication": { "text": "Is this thing on? Feeding The Machine comes back from a long hiatus." } } ] }