Daenney's blog

update: We’ve settled on the name Vox Pupuli. It’s a play on the Latin “vox populi”, voice of the people, but in our case ends up meaning “voice of the puppets”. As quite a few of you know at PuppetConf 2014 we started a community collaboration effort on the maintenance of modules and tooling in the Puppet ecosystem. In our enthusiasm we baptised it Puppet Community. 20/20 hindsight The term Puppet Community (puppet-community) clashes in all kinds of ways with just the community around Puppet, the Puppet community.

Part of the fun of Puppetconf is getting to talk to so many people and learning clever new tricks from each other. I knew IntelliJ had some support for writing Puppet code but as Travis showed me it’s been greatly improved. If you’re running IntelliJ you’ll need to install both the Ruby and the Puppet plugins. If you’re on RubyMine only the latter is needed. By default the Puppet plugin handles single modules really well and gives you things like code completion and refactoring support for your classes and (defined) types.

Based on a remark of a friend about preconceptions we have with regard to gender I started looking more carefully at how I use gender pronouns. Though I’m usually fairly diligent in writing I noticed I failed entirely in speech. This usually happens to me when I meet a new person because at that point I have no context to go on. My autopilot takes over and based on their physique, dress style and preconceptions around gender that have been drilled into me for over 20 years, I end up selecting a pronoun like “he” or “she”.

If you’re following me through social media it won’t have escaped your attention that my avatar turned rainbow and there was a distinct increase in rainbows throughout my feed as we were ramping up to Pride. Many people outside the LGBTQ community and even quite a few within don’t realise the importance of Pride and just see it as a shameless parade. It is far from that. After having helped organise our participation at Pride this year a few colleagues and I wrote a piece on the intranet about why we participated and what we did.

Bootstrapping a modern, r10k powered, masterless, Puppet 4 setup on Debian and Ubuntu. pupa is a toy project of mine. Essentially I decided to bring all my personal machines under full Puppet control. Inspired by how our Puppet setup works at my job I decided to go for a masterless setup. The problem really is to get Puppet on your machine. Once it’s there everything else is easy and as you’ll see if you look at the script I’m actually using Puppet to bootstrap part of itself.

Last night Europe went to war. No the Germans didn’t start it, we were just having a huge music contest followed by some political voting to decide who should win. I adore the Eurovision Song Contest It might not be a manly thing to admit to but it’s one of those things that just gets me ridiculously, over the rainbow to the moon, happy. It’s also been a fairly progressive contest with LGBTQ members participating and people in drag aren’t unfamiliar to the Eurovision either.

Today I made one of the hardest decisions I’ve made in a while. I decided to give up maintainership of two projects that I originally started. The projects are pypuppetdb, a library to talk to the PuppetDB API, and Puppetboard, a dashboard for PuppetDB that leverages pypuppetdb. Both projects started two years ago during my time at Nedap. The existing open source dashboards for Puppet sort of sucked and none of them were using PuppetDB so we were storing lots of duplicate data and in an inefficient manner too.

After my post on LGBTQ in tech a lot of people reached out to me, thanking me for the post, with a lot of kind words and some even with a resounding “yes that’s me too”. It’s been heartwarming to see the support this story gathered and how the Puppet community, which is the one I interact with the most, reacted to it. Interestingly though some have raised the point that LGBTQ are not a minority in tech.

Most people who know me know I’m gay, or that I identify as gay or queer or whichever way you’re more comfortable phrasing or thinking about it. To put it bluntly: I like men, I date men, I sleep with men, I happen to be a man and it’s all good. The thing that struck me about tech when I started getting more involved in online communities is that no one cared about this fact.

As some of you know I’m the unofficial maintainer of the apt module from Puppetlabs. Together with Morgan from the Puppetlabs Module Team we try and keep that module up to date and in good shape. The apt module has not seen a significant revision since its inception in 2010. Over the past 4 years it has accumulated feature after feature without anyone taking a hard looking at what was going on inside.