Kartar.Net

Why I keep publishing small open source tools and plug-ins on GitHub: ego, career value, learning, and paying back what other sysadmins gave me

Trying out Mafia, a Sinatra application generator, and contributing a binary plus a default action to scratch my own itch

A small Sinatra and DataMapper scoreboard built for Puppet Labs ticket triage days, fed by a Redmine plugin that emits update events

Reading more Kindle titles, wading through self-published genre fiction, and thinking about what value print publishers still offer authors

Heading off on a week in Oaxaca and Mexico City followed by a week in New Orleans with a side trip to New Iberia

Three failure modes that derail a minimum viable product: failing to ship, ignoring customer feedback, and conflating MVP with poor quality

Moving the site from Wordpress to Jekyll to better fit my workflow of writing locally in Vim and version controlling everything

Cleaning up the Puppet status panel with a per-node detail screen, per-node run history, Redis hashes instead of JSON, and tidier code

A Sinatra and Redis prototype that displays Puppet run statuses by collecting reports via a custom Puppet report processor

Adding a Puppet report processor that pushes metrics and events from each Puppet run to the DataDog API for graphing and event tracking

A Puppet report processor that opens a Zendesk ticket for each failed Puppet run, with the run log as the ticket description

A Puppet Face sub-command that queries and creates Redmine trouble tickets from the Puppet command line, requiring Puppet 2.7

Sharing two weekend bonus report processors that notify a HipChat room or send an SMS via Twilio when a Puppet run fails

Releasing a report processor that ships failed Puppet runs as Growl notifications to a desktop Growl server over UDP port 9887

A Puppet report processor that sends Jabber and XMPP notifications when Puppet runs fail, using the xmpp4r gem

A Puppet report processor that sends alerts to PagerDuty when Puppet runs fail, including the failing host name and log output

A Puppet report processor that posts failed Puppet runs to Twitter via OAuth, with setup steps for the gems and yaml config

Releasing the second report processor of the week, this one notifies a Campfire room when a Puppet run fails and pastes in the log output

Kicking off a week of report processor demos with two new processors that notify an IRC channel of failed runs and send metrics to Ganglia

Releasing a Puppet integration for John Vincent's Noah configuration store with an ENC, get and put functions, and a config fact

Building a Puppet Face inspired by knife-github-cookbooks that installs modules from GitHub and diffs them against your installed copies

GhostRed is a prototype gem that scans GitHub pull requests, opens matching Redmine tickets, and closes the request with a link

A rough Puppet module that installs Cloud Foundry VCAP on Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS, going beyond the Ubuntu-only vcap-setup installer

Announcing that the book Jeff McCune and I wrote is now shipping, complete with the proper index readers asked for

A handful of photos taken around Amsterdam in the days before Puppet Camp

Puppet 2.7 ships an early network device type and provider letting you manage Cisco interfaces and vlans over ssh or telnet

Wrapping up the manuscript for Pro Puppet with Jeff McCune, covering Puppet 2.6.x, MCollective, scaling, and reporting in a dozen chapters

Puppet-RunDeck 0.0.4 adds tag output to the generated XML resource document, available via a gem update

A new Vagrant provisioner shipping in 0.7.0 that lets a VM connect to a Puppet master in client-server mode and run as a configured node

Why I have been spending a few minutes a week funding small creative and community projects on Kickstarter and what backers receive in return

Puppet-RunDeck 0.0.3 drops the stored configuration requirement and now pulls nodes and facts from the YAML terminus instead

A simple Rbot plugin using the GitHub API that lets an IRC channel query issues and commits for a configured repository

Strategies for managing configuration across many servers covering lifecycle mapping, context, green-field projects, buy-in, and tool selection

Hacking up puppet-rundeck as a Resource Model Provider that feeds RunDeck a list of nodes from Puppet's stored configuration in XML

Announcing work on a follow-up to Pulling Strings with Puppet, with updated content covering 2.6.0 features, scaling, environments, and extension writing

My stand-alone Puppet provisioner has shipped in Vagrant 0.6.9, letting boxes be provisioned with Puppet manifests instead of Chef

A pointer to my guest post on the Agile Web Operations blog covering DevOps, smoking, operations, and occasional swearing

Reading Paul Kelly's mongrel autobiography in one long chain smoking gulp and finding the song behind the title

Marking around a thousand old blog posts private because they record parts of other people's lives that aren't mine to share

A checklist of context, versions, platforms, and reproduction steps that turn a bug report from painful to easy for a maintainer to act on

A direct response to Australian media debate about consent, arguing that sex with someone unable to consent is rape, full stop

Releasing 2.6.2 with new user type properties for managing password minimum and maximum age and account expiry dates

A first cut port of Ubuntu's Mootbot meeting bot from Eggdrop to an Rbot plug-in, with voting and tracking working

Shipping a maintenance release with preliminary JRuby support, an extlookup function, a master load testing tool, and md5 hashing

Puzzling over American tipping etiquette as an Australian: who to tip, how much, what counts as good service, and whether staff actually receive it

Pointing readers at the Eventbrite registration page for the 2010 San Francisco Puppet Camp gathering

Shipping the 2.6.0 major release with the full XMLRPC to REST cut-over, Windows support, a rewritten reporting system, and a single binary

Puppet 2.6.0 RC4 ships with the REST cutover, Windows support, language enhancements, and a rewritten events and reporting system

Shipping a Dashboard maintenance release with bug fixes, UI updates, search on index pages, and new APT and Yum packages from Puppet Labs

Puppet 2.6.0 RC3 lands with the XMLRPC to REST cutover, basic Windows support, a rewritten reporting system, and an internal Ruby DSL