Posts

I’ve noticed half of my posts on this blog have been about me fiddling with my blog. I like to tinker, and something like this blog which I actually have to maintain solo gives me an opportunity to try new technologies. Like docker for example! Docker’s something I’ve had some basic understanding about for a while. I’ve used it for testing, and I’ve got a vague idea how it works, but there were so many things to understand to get anything working. Just like a lot of new technologies, there’s a lot of plugins, tools and extensions to understand to figure out whats going on. Do I use Swarm or Kubernetes? ...

So I originally set up this blog way, way back in 2013. I’d been using Octopress and a Github hosted page. But it made it look like every other Jekyll blog out there. I had attended TwilioCon 2013, and Hannah Wolfe gave a presentation on Ghost. It sounded pretty cool, and DigitalOcean had just created a Ghost image to play around with. So I booted one up and it worked pretty well! The problem was, since it was an image, it was pretty annoying to maintain. I was stuck with Ghost 0.3 for a while. I remember looking into how hard it would be to automate with Puppet, but the only Ghost module on the forge at the time wasn’t working for me. So I put it in my to-do pile to automate with Puppet, and left it. ...

Header image: https://flic.kr/p/7Lx9Kk As someone who’s started out in dev and ended up falling into ops, a lot of my approaches are heavily influenced by what I cut my teeth on early on. Since I started out development Ruby and Rails, I learnt a lot about Test Driven Development. In fact, even before I did Rails, I was working a little on cuke4duke, a JVM Cucumber package. I’m a big fan of using TDD when writing Puppet code, as I think it really helps with my workflow and brings a lot of advantages. ...

Every 3-4 months, Puppetlabs has a Triage-a-thon. It’s a cool opertunity to get your hands dirty looking at the puppet source code, help fix some outstanding issues and generally help out the community. Everyone jumps on IRC, and you can fish through the Puppetlabs Jira and find out what you can fix, and sometimes just do a bit of janitor-ing removing old tickets that are resolved or nudging people for reviews and the like. ...

It started with a few temporary bash scripts. I think of Bash scripts as basically technical debt a lot of the time. “Hmm, when I get some spare time I’ll fix those” things that niggle in the back of my mind. The ones on this project were pretty hard to maintain and took way too long. Mostly they were used to log onto a given array of servers and perform some actions, so they ran everything in sequence, and if anything broke along the way, it would block everything else from being run. But we’d been pretty busy and other stories have taken precidence, so I’ve tried to put them out of mind. ...