Image courtesy of Adam Sharp. It is with mixed feelings and after a decade+ of downtime that I decided to revive istwitterdown.com. I will not even try to summarize the drama that unfolded as Elon Musk tried to, tried not to and then was forced to purchase Twitter and take it private. But I think things have gotten to the point that the site going down is a real possibility.

For Staff+ engineers personal growth is often fueled by organizational growth. In my time at CZI, I founded and worked as the Principal Engineer for our Infrastructure and Security group. One of the things I have been reflecting on recently is the ability for organizational growth to fuel individual growth. Back in the day when I was fighting the Fail Whale I found that rapid organizational growth and change enabled rapid personal growth and learning.

Yak Shaving is among the more colorful sayings used by software engineers. And it is an idea that, once you know it, you see everywhere. I worked on a team at Twitter that went so far as to have a Yak as our team mascot. But what is yak shaving? According to wiktionary, it is– Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

Rebooting…

We’re excited to announce the open source release of cztack (we pronounce it “stack”), a major tool in CZI’s infrastructure. cztack is a framework of Terraform modules that enables teams to build better, more robust cloud infrastructure with less pain. Along with fogg for managing Terraform infrastructure-as-code repositories, cztack provides a set of common building blocks that CZI engineers use to build infrastructure. To explain why this project exists, we’ll tell you a bit about how CZI works.