Devops Building a Devops Team (Part One) Another entry from the archives. I had the honour to work alongside and mentor Brian Henerey, for Sony Computer Entertainmenr Europe, in 2011. It was a fascinating time for us,
Vim How to Manage Documents With Long Lines in Vim When using a text editor as a software developer, we're generally aware of conventions around line length, and develop good habits, or adhere to coding standards established by the team
Sysadmin A Practical Approach to Debugging Apache Modules These days, The Apache webserver is seen as rather unfashionable, and out of favour, compared to nginx, but despite this, it's still the most widely deployed, powering 43% of the
Devops Imaging vs Automation: A Perspective from 2010 From the archives, Bitfield Consulting's John Arundel discusses the merits of configuration management vs images. I find it fascinasting to reflect on how the way we approach application automation has
Sysadmin Understanding Pushd and Popd One of the more powerful, and under-used, under-appreciated, and little-understood capabilities of text-based command line environments is the ability to interact with the filesystem as a stack with the `pushd`, `popd`and `dirs` commands
Devops The First Ever Devopsdays I've been reviewing old articles on Agile Sysadmin, as I dust it down and polish it up, ready for more writing. It's fascinating to see the things that have changed,
Chef Chef Cookbook Templating with Cookiecutter One of the challenges in chef cookbook development - create a comprehensive cookbook template. Good cookbook template might standarize your cookbooks, fill them with convenient predefinitions and save your time.
Emacs Incrementing Macros in Emacs Emacs macros are amazing. I was editing a document today, which started off as a list of sentences which I wanted to convert into numbered headlines, followed by some boilerplate
Productivity The Return of the Hipster PDA Years ago, when I first started using GTD, the work/life management system pioneered by David Allen, my first cut at a GTD implementation was the Hipster PDA. The HPDA
Chef Using Test Doubles in ChefSpec One of the improvements to ChefSpec in the 3.0 release is the ability to extend test coverage to execute blocks. Doing so requires the infrastructure developer to stub out
AWS The Impact of Amazon's new CloudFormation service Let me put to rest the worst of the FUD. This was never a master plan by Amazon to wipe out Chef and Puppet in a hostile takeover of the configuration management territory. Opscode were part of the CloudFormation Beta, and deeper integration with
Tips and Tricks How to print every nth line of a file Sometimes a scripting language isn't the right tool for the job. I've been working on a piece of code that parses huge logfiles. The test data needed to be representative
Emacs DNS Zone File Fun with Python and Emacs Sometimes we're faced with a boring, manual, labourious job which really needs to be done, will take a fairly long time, and be pretty unpleasant. Whenever I'm faced with something
Tips and Tricks Setting the MySQL client as a user's shell Sometimes corporate firewalls can be a real headache for developers. We had a situation today in which we needed to provide read-only access to a MySQL database, but had only
