Puppet Standalone Mode

Puppet “Standalone” Mode

Dashboarding

All I wanted was a huge TV hanging above our workspace displaying the build server status page. Too much to ask from the enormous IT market in 2015? Apparently.

A Project Management Revelation

The developer in this story had been attending status meetings. These were good meetings, they were attempts at transparency and cross-functional communication. They were snappy and there was always time for questions.

Collective Virtual Meetings

Though we don’t readily admit it, the team I’m on is part of a remote organization. We have offices in multiple time zones, work-from-home folks in different states, and offshore partners. We are trying to build a culture of remote/async work even when a lot of meetings happen in this office.

Build Automation

I participated in an online panel on Build Automation: Quality and Velocity at Scale as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about Agile, Continuous Delivery and Devops. Automating the build pipeline has many challenges, including 3rd party dependencies, consistency and standardization, and testing.

Emphasis

Command-line tools should emphasize the feature that you most likely want to use given the situation (context-sensitive, so to speak). If you run the foo command in an empty directory, it should help you out.

Recovering Systems

I inherited a bad IT system: out-of-support servers, end-of-life applications, snowflake configurations, forgotten customizations, no monitoring, and no inventory. I wasn’t entirely surprised when I noticed that the directory service (OpenLDAP) was producing a zero-byte backup. It failed like this through the backup rotation window. We had no good backups on the machine, on the storage server, or offsite!