2016

I was invited to speak at DevOpsDays Detroit 2016. I had a fantastic time speaking with the crowd in Detroit. This talk was my first foray into the talk world. I went long and could probably optimize the content of the slides (less words). However, I was very happy with the positive feedback and was blown away by how great the DevOpsDays volunteers and organizers. Slides

I have recently been added on to a PagerDuty rotation. I am sure numerous on-call people have a lot of different strategies to managing their rotations. However, there were two pieces of information I immediately wanted from PagerDuty: Can I add my on-call rotation to my Google Calendar or Mac Calendar app? What number is going to call me in the middle of the night to wake me up? The answer to both those questions is an astounding, “YES!...

The contents of this article originally appeared on DZone A few weeks ago, one of my DevOps counterparts was working on building out a new environment for one of our applications. This deployment included a new Puppet server (we are in an orchestration/configuration management state of flux) and my teammate was having some issues provisioning users (I did not ask why nor did I really care). My teammate asked if I could help with some Ansible knowledge....

Note: If you know of other remixes that showcase the lyrics of Notorious B.I.G., please let me know. The Notorious B.I.G., Biggie, Biggie Smalls, Big Poppa, The Black Frank White, The King of New York, however you refer to him, Christopher Wallace was one of the best rappers to ever walk planet earth. Since Biggie’s death in 1997 his timeless lyrics have served as a foundation for many remixes and mashups....

The Ansible lineinfile module is designed to search a file for a line, and ensure that it is present or absent. lineinfile is very effective at that particular task. However, when the line has to be in a certain place or before or after a certain line, lineinfile becomes a hassle to manage. Most people on IRC (#ansible) tend to agree, lineinfile is not a very good module in practice. Even Brain Coca says to avoid the lineinfile module....