adrift on a cosmic ocean

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…

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: `` What kind of output would you expect would happen if you ran rake test right now? If you said nil you'd be right…

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). Enjoy!

I'm still building up to my article on how to properly mock calls to Rake's sh to facilitate testing of your Rakefile tasks but I haven't quite worked up the strength to trace the calls through the libraries and into Eigenclass wonderland. For the moment, I've got just enough fodder to write a bit about determinism in testing. Since Friday, both a coworker and I have been hit by the same testing…