Good to be Back It was good to be back in Ghent! It’d been 6 years since I was last here for Cfgmgmtcamp, but the memories flooded back quickly. The last time I was here was in 2020… I was speaking about Testing Infra as Code I’ve changed a lot since then, including growing a stache and wearing a baseball cap I guess! ...
Man, nothing excites and/or terrifies me more than speaking in public. Speaking at FOSDEM has been a goal of mine, ever since I learned of its existence in 2014. Such a huge event, so many people, so many awesome talks to hear. When I got accepted this year, I got the familiar feeling: joy of being accepted, the nagging dread of the upcoming event. I learnt the hard way that speaking at FOSDEM is very different than just visiting. I ended up missing out a lot of the first day because I was panicking in my hotel room doing some last minute changes to slides after talking to a few people the night before. ...
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. ...
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. ...