Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
So I was going to post a comment on the original blog post which I linked to from here but Facebook connect was broken and I don't feel like setting up yet another account </1stworldproblems>... but there was a slight development.
I attempted to use the same methodology we had already followed with the first app, to another app so that this one was also packaged using Bundler and RPM. Needing to confirm that all was well before I committed the changes I did some testing in a CentOS virtual machine in Vagrant. To be expected, with a deployment bundle of a decent few gems the package size…
I've previously made presentations and blog posts about Puppet and module testing - my position is that you should treat Puppet code as just that: code. Just like mainstream programming languages, it is possible (and good practice) to test your Puppet manifests so that you have higher confidence in them working when it comes time to actually run them.
There are some other factors which play a part…
Recently I was working with one of our valued Thoughtworkers on an application we were trying to not only develop in a sane way, but package and deploy to production with just as much sanity. The status quo seems to favour bundler on the development side, but RPMs on the production side (if you judge these decisions based on what developers and ops folk prefer, generally).
After a reasonable amount of WTFing, we actually managed to get it working reasonably well. If you have Ruby apps with gem dependencies and want to develop and push to production with equal ease I suggest you read the blog post on the subject by Philip Potter here: …
So this is what the world looks like when I have had sleep. Its good. its surreal. I have motivation to write a blog post for the first time in months.
Since returning to Berlin early 2012 - Kaichen has been in Kita. This has allowed me to have time to sleep and also be "alone" for a few hours each day for the first time since he was born ( over two years)- and this "freedom" for want of a…
These days I'm noticing myself saying more and more frequently that Duck Typing is great, except when it's not.
An amusing issue that briefly cropped up this afternoon was when we failed to correctly negotiate a data structure inside of a Rake task. Consider the following basic task: ``
desc "a test task"
task :test, :glob do |t,args|
if args[:glob].nil?
args[:glob] = 'some default value…It has been quite a while since I've had anything sufficiently detailed or interesting to post on a technical theme so it was quite a welcome divergence from the usual sprint work recently when we started having some Puppet performance issues. First up, like most people working at big corporations I can't give you any figures that might give away numbers of servers or anything else sensitive but…
I had a very brief moment of inspiration this weekend when a realisation occurred to me. It's nothing amazing, and it has probably already been mentioned many (dozens of, thousands of?) times before but I'll say it anyway. My fundamental approach to work has changed due to the "cloud", or rather, easily provisionable and destroyable virtual machines. This may be pretty obvious but it's worth…
If you know me from my professional life you may think of me as a techy, obsessive-compulsive, slightly (or aggressively) arrogant person driven to making some cool large systems work. But I'm also a family man, and for the last two months I've been separated from two-thirds of that family. During the last vacation back to Australia, I came back at the start of January while my wife and son stayed…
I've been spreading this excellent talk by Gary Bernhardt around my co-workers and friends who universally love it. I'm also proud to say the "WAT" meme has (hopefully permanently) entered my team's culture as we find it adequately sums up our feelings towards various bits of software that we either have to work with or maintain.
Half my team is away on business trips or sick leave at the moment…
I gave yet another permutation of my talk about DevOps in Big Enterprise tonight at the Berlin DevOps meetup. I last gave it as a 45 minute presentation at the VelocityConf BoF and prior to that as a 5 minute Ignite talk at DevOpsDays Göteborg. This time I'm actually uploading the slides (although they are fairly minimalistic).