Straight after FOSDEM was CfgMgmtCamp. I actually made a bunch of notes about the event, as it was super-fun, but my tablet had to be factory-reset and I lost most of them which hadn’t been synced. But thought I’d write some of my general thoughts anyway! Regardless it was a pretty cool event, and it was cool putting names to faces I’d talked to on the #puppet and #puppet-dev freenode channels. ...

So, my I may have slightly miscalculated how early I needed to get to the airport for my flight to Brussels for FOSDEM 2014… I try to get to the airport super early, as I’ve managed to never miss a flight, I’m normally before checkin even opens. So, I look at my ticket and I mentally add in 2 hours before I need to get there and book a taxi. Somewhere along the line, I’d managed to do this 2 hour calculation twice. So I stayed up all night and got a lift from my friends place to Heathrow. ...

Last week I went to FOSDEM, followed by CfgMgmtCamp. It was an amazing experience, I met a lot of cool people and learnt a lot… but I’ll talk more about those later in a dedicated blog post. For now, I want to talk about IRC. One of the things I came away from 4 days of open-source and configuration management talks was: “The decision was made on IRC” or “A broad consensus was made on Freenode” and the like. ...

99% of the time, if I need to code something, my language of choice is Ruby. Nothing in particular drove me to start using it, but I was at a Java house which switched to being a Ruby house, so I changed accordingly. Since then I’ve been doing a lot of devops-y stuff, and a lot of devops tools are written in Ruby, so it’s kinda stuck. Plus, I’ve grown fond of how easy it is to throw together a proof of concept together without much setup, and there are hundreds of gems out there that you can build on. ...

A month ago I had the pleasure of going to the Dublin Web Summit. Unfortunately, I managed to get Conference Flu that took me out of commission for a few days, followed by a busy few weeks of work (and other conferences!) so I didn’t get a chance to talk about my time there. There was a crazy amount of stuff to see and do, so I’ll see if I can get down as much as I remember over a month later! ...