Posts

EDIT: So, this blog was linked by DevOps Weekly #379, and seems to have climbed the SEO ranking for Hiera and Vault, but I’ve learn a lot and have some general changes since then. I did a webinar on the subject I’ll be writing an updated version of how to use Vault and Hiera soon, and link it here. Although I don’t work at Puppet anymore, it’s still my favourite config management software, and I use it for the management of machines under my control, including my home storage server and several MacBooks. ...

The main piece of tech that I maintain myself is this blog, so I usually find time to play with it, try new technology such as Docker. Unsurprisingly, this has led it to be a little over-engineered, and I wanted something simpler. Why was I trying to figure out how to configure a database in a container for a blog that only I was maintaining? I didn’t need CMS-like functionality, if anything I needed a static site. ...

Today is a very big day for me. Today is my last day at Puppet. Puppet has been a huge part of my life for almost 7 years. It all started way back in 2011, when I was working at Simply Business. We’d just done a big shift to continuous deployment. We had a fully working deployment pipeline, but our ops workflows were starting to creak a bit at the seams. We started a new project to start managing the sytems with Puppet in an agentless model, and I was hooked. ...

So, I looked at my blog and realised I didn’t blog at all in 2017. Honestly, it was a pretty evenful year for me, so I think I have a good excuse: I switched roles at Puppet, changing from Pro Service Engineer to Techinical Account Manager I got married I went on a two week honeymoon And right at the end of the year, I had a baby I did a lot of travel, not quite as much as 2016, but a lot: ...

Well, here it is, Day 30 of the #vdm30in30. Here’s some stats on the last 30 days of posts: 23,343 Words 213,374 Characters 238 Sentences 29 Paragraphs 1 hr 25 mins Reading Time 2 hrs 10 mins Speaking Time Most used words: puppet 264 (4%) provider 116 (2%) puppetlabs 93 (1%) package 90 (1%) should 87 (1%) code 85 (1%) cockpit 85 (1%) opt 84 (1%) executed 80 (1%) run 79 (1%) Not sure how accurate that is because there’s a lot of code snippets in there, but seems about right: Each post was roughly about 750 words or so. ...