This seems to be a common topic of conversation, so I figure I should put it on paper (so to speak) what I value as a systems administrator, or “sysadmin.”
Keep it simple Ensure it can be reproduced Keep it close to stock Magic is bad No development tools on the server Prefer complexity at compile time over runtime Consume artifacts What does this mean?
The fewer moving parts, the easier to diagnose By keeping things simple, reproduceable, and close to their defaults, this sets a sysadmin up for success when things go wrong.
Given the recent news that broke about Chef’s changes to their licensing model (and the associated FAQ), a lot of chaos has ensued and I feel the need to straighten out a few things since I’ve been present for most every public development so far.
Here’s a quick overview:
Rebranding of products Open source release of Chef Automate Change in licensing, affecting monetization Price increase for commercial licenses Let’s break these down into more consumable pieces.
I’ve been using InSpec for over 2 years now and have been writing automated tests for longer than that. What’s the one thing that I’ve seen trip up the most people? Useless tests.
InSpec as a project is based off of RSpec, a behavior driven testing framework. That isn’t to say Gherkin like “Given X, When Y, I should see Z”, but rather a more generic definition. RSpec promotes writing tests in a feature-oriented manner:
Since starting this blog, I’ve encountered any number of topics where I’ve literally said, “Maybe I’ll write a blog post about that…” The biggest hinderance has always been thus:
When I’m at my computer, I want to code. When I’m away from my computer, I’m typically on my phone scrolling through twitter or reddit, wishing I would blog more like the posts I end up reading.
Netlify I typically use Netlify for deploying any static sites these days, if only because I can easily hook it up to github and auto-deploy using more than just Jekyll, even going so far as to have a custom domain with LetsEncrypt TLS certs.
As I was browsing twitter this evening, I came across a tweet by @searls asking newer rubyists (<5 years) what some still confusing concepts are in Ruby. The most common concept that remained confusing was symbols, so here’s my explanation of it.
In order to explain symbols, I must first explain datatypes.
Datatypes Do you know the difference between datatypes?
Primitives There’s a string (e.g., "Lorem ipsum dolor"), which is a set of characters (chars).
Yet another email from yet another recruiter, today. This is one more email sent to an address I haven’t used since 2014. If their sources of information really 3 years old, why are they pinging me about my work with Ruby on Rails? 3 years ago I wasn’t publicly posting any such interest online.
How are they getting this information? I’m not certain, but I suspect it’s scraping Github’s API.
