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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. ...

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. ...