Kartar.Net

Releasing a Puppet report processor that pushes notifications of failed runs to Opsgenie using a customer API key and recipient list

Releasing a Puppet report processor that ships per-host metrics like changed resources and config retrieval time to StatHat

Announcing the release of a book on deploying log management with LogStash, available as PDF, ePub, or Kindle edition

Why Nagios and its kin fail virtualised and cloud environments, and why a fresh paradigm is needed to handle the new scale

A free sample chapter is now available covering how to get logs into LogStash without using the LogStash agent

Multi-part series on lessons from self publishing

How to add captions to delimited Markdown code blocks so that Pandoc emits LaTeX listings with both syntax highlighting and a caption

Nan Liu and Dan Bode have written a whole book on developing Puppet types and providers, available on Kindle and in print

Announcing a mailing list for updates and announcements about The Logstash Book, prompted by a reader pointing out it was overdue

Announcing work on a hands-on book about deploying log management infrastructure with the open source LogStash tool, due February 2013

Releasing a module that installs the AppFirst collector on Red Hat, Debian, and Ubuntu and adds a type and provider for managing NRPE checks

Relocating from Portland to a place in downtown Brooklyn for a stretch in a much larger city

Sharing a report processor that ships each Puppet log event to Square's Cube time series collector as a labelled event for dashboard display

Lessons from years of customer-facing roles: own the impact, over-communicate, keep your cool, and treat people as you would want to be treated

A Puppet report processor that sends Puppet run metrics to Librato using the librato-metrics gem, with module install steps

Adding GitHub OAuth2 support to the Puppet Online Linter so authorised private repositories can now be linted on commit

Why firing well matters, the three broad reasons it happens, and guidelines for handling it with honesty, transparency, and minimal damage

A tiny Ruby gem that provides finger-style command line output for any Twitter user, built mostly to entertain myself for ten minutes

Worrying that naming a team DevOps just relocates the silo problem instead of changing the culture, process, and tooling underneath

Notes from a trip to Socorro for a job fair, green chili season, and a detour out to see the Very Large Array radio telescope

Sharing a report processor that pushes each Puppet log entry onto a Kestrel distributed message queue via the kestrel-client gem

A look at CopperEgg's SAAS monitoring and updates to their Puppet module adding a type and provider for their uptime monitoring API

Younger candidates lean too hard on their schooling, so here is what to lead with instead: cover letters, published code, and clubs or collaboration

Releasing a small Sinatra prototype called PSigner that exposes an API for signing Puppet certificates as a starting point for extension

Adding a GitHub post-receive hook to the Puppet Online Linter so each commit gets parsed, linted, and emailed back to the committer

Launching a small Sinatra service that accepts Puppet manifest uploads or API submissions and returns lint errors on screen

Reflecting on what home means as an expat in Portland, and the short list of criteria I actually use to judge a place to live

A pushback against absolutist takes on Heroku and the cloud, arguing the right answer depends on performance, compliance, and your needs

A Puppet report processor that sends run status and metrics to a Riemann server using the riemann-client gem

Releasing v1.0.0 of the Puppet module to install, manage, and report to Boundary, now available on the Forge

A small external node classifier that pulls node definitions from the Yana node authority and maps Yana tags and attributes into Puppet

Practical habits I am trying to manage feelings of being a fraud at work, including trusting fear, finding a mentor, and naming the problem

Wrapping up seven months of paperwork to get our US Green Cards via the Diversity Lottery, and what the new status changes for us

American education providers are businesses dressed up as philanthropic institutions, and students are customers whether they realise it or not

Adding to Luke Kanies' rule about avoiding food in transportation hubs with my own hard-earned rule: never eat the breakfast buffet

Fixing 404s and broken asset paths when deploying a Sinatra app under a sub URI, using sinatra-static-assets and the url helper

A short personal piece on loving cities, their noise and smell, mass transit, the rain on concrete, and the crush of people

How Puppet Labs uses written exercises and short coding challenges to filter candidates before phone screens and reduce screening time

Why the Puppet Labs ops team picked IRC for team chat and how a Cinch-based bot called Lampwick handles tickets, alerts, and assorted memes

Why so many Arts graduates wind up in IT and how consuming, assimilating, and synthesising information makes us well suited to it

Why I gave in and started carrying a folding clasp knife after moving to Portland and meeting American consumer packaging up close

A run through Hackers, Swordfish, Firewall, WarGames, Sneakers, AntiTrust, and The Net with notes on what each gets right and wrong

Releasing a Puppet report processor that pushes notifications of failed runs to a Flowdock team collaboration room via the Flowdock gem

A short post sharing an animated graphic a colleague made of me alongside Nigel from the Spinal Tap movie

Releasing a Puppet module that handles Cloudkick agent installation and node creation via the Cloudkick API

Why most so-called product comparisons are really subjective case studies, and how to identify and write objective ones worth using

Why World of Warcraft never grabbed me despite a fair shot: repetitive grind quests and a social model that depends on awkward time zones

An early look at Sensu, Sonian's RabbitMQ based cloud monitoring framework, plus a Puppet module and Vagrant file for trying it

A look at Boundary's network and flow monitoring tool and a Puppet module I wrote to deploy their probes

A small Weechat plug-in that pushes IRC highlights and private messages to an Android phone via the NotifyMyAndroid service