The opscode community summit was a two day, community organized, unconferences. It was organized like many other unconferences with no set schedule or talks, merely a bunch of people sharing the same interests and then scheduling around open spaces. This format worked really well for the size of the summit, which was around 250 people. The tl;dr summary was that almost every discussion eventually touched on the idea that our chef workflow is very broken. Read more

Recently I've been reading and thinking quite a bit about what ‘we’ as developers are really doing, or attempting to accomplish. I'm sure this has happened to tons of other people and it's gone away or gotten worse, depending on the individual. I'm think I'm done trying to make money. It's has proved to be pretty easy, and I don't want to be wealthy, or own things I can't afford, or go on trips that I can't pay for. Read more

I'm taking part in the beta program for Dell's project sputnik, and I'm going to be writing up some of my notes on what I think of the machine. This is the day one review, so more will follow. A little background: I've been a desktop/laptop linux user for about five years now, and have been administrating linux and unix servers in some capacity for the past nine. I'm coming from a linux mint based Lenovo ThinkPad x220. Read more

I'm leaving Atlanta after a series of bad things happened and one good one. The good one is that I was hired by ThoughtWorks to be an awesome devOps consultant. This means that I have to learn the Thoughtworks way of doing things, which means learning agile. I've been staffed on a couple projects already, so have been on agile teams, but not managed my own project. I have a ton to do, so I'm going to organize it using Pivotal Tracker and applying agile methodologies as well as possible for a team of one. Read more

These are notes I took while doing an assignment for a friend. I was on a pretty serious time constraint, so I cut some corners, which I will address at the end of the article. I'm not advocating that this is the best way to structure a project like this, but I think it's pretty good given the situation. We're writing a tomcat app in Eclipse, on Windows boxes. As it stands, we're not doing any kind of automated testing, we have version control (svn) , but we're not particularlly attached to it, and we would like to be able to single-click deploy to a number of environments. Read more

This may be just about my process, but my .vimrc is an unbelievable time suck for me. When I sit down to play with or learn a new language or framework, the first thing I do is go grab syntax highlighting files, snippets, and whatever vim plugins that can do some hand-holding and prevent me from doing stupid things. For coffeescript and clojure, this turned into a battle that caused me to initially drop vim for learning them. Read more