LinuxWorld 2008
I'll be speaking at LinuxWorld this year, on Puppet of course. I'll be giving a reprise of my Velocity talk, I expect, but since it's the best Puppet talk I've ever given but was the first time I'd given that particular talk, I think this one will be even better. And, unfortunately, the Velocity talk wasn't recorded, so your only chance to see it is to show up at LinuxWorld.
If you're in SF and want to meet up, ping me and we can plan something on Thursday night. Maybe drinks at The Irish Bank?
Wed, 30 Jul 2008 | Tags: conference, linuxworld, sanfrancisco, travel
OATV StartupCamp and FooCamp
This post won't do nearly the justice that the last four days deserve, especially since I've barely posted this summer, but I figure better to start small than not at all.
Andrew and I just got back from OATV StartupCamp (as opposed to StartupCamp, which I've also been to ) and FooCamp. It was a great weekend -- we met a lot of great people at both events, including my personal hero Kathy Sierra, and we got a lot of advice and information on our startup.
The only thing tangible we really took away is that we laser-etched our laptops and my moleskin notebook (it went first as a guinea pig). Hopefully I'll take another picture soon; that one didn't exactly turn out. I'll probably end up scraping some color into my laptop or something, since the cuts don't show up as much as I'd like. If we ever do a conference booth, that's what we're going to show up with -- a laser etcher.
The etcher is owned by Make Magazine, but I was shown how to use it by Eric Wilhelm from Instructables. Yes, it was sweet.
Mon, 14 Jul 2008 | Tags: conference, foocamp, startupcamp, oatv
Preparing for Velocity and the Puppet MiniConf
I finally got access to my blog again (laziness combined well with the SSH key exploit to lock me out for a bit), and it's long past time I posted an update.
Andrew and I will be at Velocity Monday and Tuesday, and I'll be giving a presentation there on Tuesday afternoon. We then have to hurry downtown to CloudCamp, and then Wednesday will be at Structure. Adam Jacob says we should all be sure to attend the Velocity Ignite! on Monday night, too.
Then, because hey, free time is for losers, Jay Aras is hosting a Puppet MiniConf on Thursday
Andrew has been working steadily on getting new Puppet logos going (you should see a new favicon on the Trac site), and he promises to update our CSS in time for the conference.
And, last but not least, we'll be showing up with fancy new Puppet t-shirts. We'll be trying to figure out over the course of the week how to dole out shirts, so if you've got any good ideas, send me a note.
Anyway, I hope to see many of you over the course of the week, and I also hope to be updating far more often.
Sat, 21 Jun 2008 | Tags: conference, travel, sanfrancisco, velocity, velocity08, structure, structure08, cloudcamp
Free Ticket and Discounts for Velocity Conference
O'Reilly is putting on their first-ever operations conference this summer, Velocity (it's actually half operations and half performance). I'll definitely be attending the conference, and I'll hopefully be speaking. I know Adam Jacob is giving a talk, and they might yet find a way to fit me in.
O'Reilly has generously offered me a free ticket to give to the Puppet community, so I need to come up with some sort of dasterdly scheme to pick the best person to give it to. For those who don't get the free ticket, you can use the discount code 'vel08red' to get a 25% discount on attendance.
I've been trying to find a way to make it more obvious when I'll be at a given conference, since I'm always interested in meeting other parts of the Puppet community in person, so I'm hoping to put one of their badges up on my blog and maybe the web site soon.
Note that this is a semi-sponsored post: I'm getting a free ticket. However, I'm also helping to organize the conference (I went to the Velocity Summit with the rest of the organizers in January), and I'm more excited about this conference than I have been about any other in a while. I'm for anything we can do as a community to encourage O'Reilly to be more interested in operations. I'd certainly love to see lots of Puppeteers there.
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 | Tags: conference, velocity08, velocity, operations, oreilly
RubyConf Video is Posted
Looks my the video for my RubyConf presentation, Essential Incompleteness in Program Modeling (which I subtitled How to apply hand-wavy math to software design), has finally been posted. The slides are also available in PDF.
It's a strange talk, that's for sure. For one, it doesn't really have any code in it. And when I say "not really", I mean "none". I only even mention Ruby when talking about Puppet. For two, I kinda submitted the talk on a lark -- my Ruby submissions seem to be largely uninteresting to the Ruby community, so I figured I'd submit this as practice but that it would be denied. When it was actually accepted, I had to go write the darn thing. Third, I did relatively poorly in the presentation. I think the content was actually pretty good, but I did a poor job of organizing the slides and of presenting it. That isn't to say I think it's a bad presentation, just that it could have been much better.
It'd be interesting to be given the opportunity to give the talk in a different environment, somewhere I was just thinking about the talk and not worrying about its appropriateness.
Either way, the talk was an earnest attempt at providing what I think is a cool and useful way at looking at software design, and it's worth a look.
Sat, 29 Dec 2007 | Tags: conference, ruby, rubyconf, rubyconf2007, presentation
RubyConf Slides
Jim Meyer is collecting slides from RubyConf, so I've posted my slides for the Essential Incompleteness in Program Modeling talk I gave there.
It's a pretty hand-wavy talk, and has no code whatsoever, but I'm relatively happy with the content if not the specific flow of the talk. I generally don't make very useful slides, since it's much more about my talking than my showing you stuff on the screen, but hopefully the slides will be useful to someone.
Mon, 19 Nov 2007 | Tags: conference, rubyconf, rubyconf07, rubyconf2007, slides, godel, incompleteness, ruby
USENIX 1.0
I got home from LISA on Friday night. It's always a bit of a strange conference for me -- on the one hand, it's great to be around so many smart people interested in system administration, but on the other hand, it's really frustrating to have such a large group of smart people not really moving forward.
It's a stupid metric, but as an example, there is exactly one post on Technorati tagged with lisa2007 (other than my own), and it's by a person whose nick is that tag. Mark Hinkle also blogged about it, but he didn't tag his post such that you'd find it on Technorati.
The upside of this fact is that I can speak as badly as I want about the conference and the organization without much fear of repercussion, but the downside is that, well, no one's really talking about either one other than while at the conference.
USENIX is pushing me to write a booklet about Puppet, but I've demurred so far because their audience is too small. If they want a larger audience, they need to get this conversation going more, they need to encourage blogging, and, possibly most importantly, they need to declare a common tag that everyone can and should use when talking about LISA. Just this little reminder would get people thinking about blogging.
Toward that end, I've emailed next year's chair, Mario Obejas, about specifying an explicit tag for LISA blogging, along with awards for best sysadmin blogger and best LISA blog post. Maybe he'll say yes, and maybe it'll make a difference.
Sun, 18 Nov 2007 | Tags: conference, usenix, lisa, lisa07, lisa2007
LISA Progress Report
I'm at LISA again, in Dallas this year (which makes my fourth trip to Texas in the last few months). I ran a configuration management BoF on Tuesday night and a Puppet BoF last night. Both of them were well-attended, and we maintained good discussion through almost the entire two hours in both cases without having to resort to presentations, which I'm very happy about.
LISA itself doesn't seem to have changed all that much over the years. In fact, someone complained to me that USENIX should be prescribing antidepressants before the config-mgmt BoF because it hasn't changed since he was last there four years ago (he did allow that Puppet was a significant change, fortunately). I unfortunately agree -- we're still discussing what the term means and how we should move forward.
This year, the biggest source of discussion in the BoF was whether and how to support ad-hoc, manual administration in an automated world. Most people in the room who spoke up wanted their automation tools to support it, but to me it's like asking compiler writers to support writing in assembly when necessary. My perspective is that assembly is a separate problem; if you want to write assembly, then do so, but don't expect my compiler to know or care that you're doing so, and certainly don't expect my compiler to extract semantics from the assembly that you wrote.
I know I've barely been blogging, and I'm going to try to fix that. I've been moving painfully slowly on this latest release, and I'm embarrassed enough at the lack of progress that I haven't wanted to publicize that, but I realize that that's a big mistake; I should instead be advertising what I'm doing and what problems I'm having (and solving), so people can clearly see what's being accomplished, even if it isn't in the form of a release.
So, hopefully, I'll start blogging more, including discussion of what's going on development-wise.
I'm also planning on blogging the test Puppet scripts that I write - these are simple scripts that I use to verify behaviour manually. For instance, here is the code currently at ~/bin/test.pp:
class yayness {
$testing = funtest
}
class other {
include yayness
$value = $yayness::testing
notify { "my value is '$value'": }
}
include other
The purpose of this was to test that the include method was no longer doing lazy evaluation.
I've also just joined Dopplr, which helps people who travel track their friends' travel, hopefully helping them to meet up in the various destinations. I use TripIt to organize my travel, but Dopplr is really a different kind of service and is relatively complementary -- TripIt is useful for keeping track of all of the details I need when traveling (confirmation codes, times, etc.), while Dopplr can hopefully allow me to meet up with friends who are in town while I'm traveling.
Thu, 15 Nov 2007 | Tags: travel, lisa, lisa2007, usenix, dallas, conference, puppet, lisa07
Presenting Puppet at LinuxConf.au
My proposal was fortunately accepted at LinuxConf.au, so I will again get the opportunity to visit Melbourne. I was at LCA last year (the video is available) and it was by far the best technical conference I've been to, so I'm thrilled to be able to speak at it again. I'm especially excited because it looks like my wife will be able to attend with me, which will be great.
James Turnbull (for whom I cannot seem to find a good link, but he wrote the Nagios Pro books) has been a big part of getting my talk accepted, at least partially because he's working on a book about Puppet, so he deserves a shout out. And I'm really looking forward to the book; he's been getting active on the mailing list and IRC channel, trying to understand and at the same time fix the documentation, and at the end we'll have a great book to help people learn.
Hopefully the conference will be as great this year as it was last year.
Fri, 24 Aug 2007 | Tags: travel, conference, lca, lca08, mel8ourne
I will be at OhioLinux
My talk was accepted at OhioLinux, so I will be in Columbus from September 28th until September 30th (probably arriving late on the 28th and leaving earlyish on the 30th).
Jorge Castro has been instrumental in getting me to this conference, and he's promised that we'll have throngs of interested Puppeteers, so I am quite looking forward to the conference. It is apparently heavy on education attendees, and Puppet clearly has strong presence in education, even in Ohio (Hi Jeff!), so it should be a ready audience for Puppet.
I hope to see many of you there.
Fri, 24 Aug 2007 | Tags: travel, ohiolinux, conference, puppet
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