Daenney's blog

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.

Today we had our usual Puppet Module triage. It’s a time a week where module contributors and the Puppetlabs Module Team gather online to discuss, comment, merge or reject PR’s against the different module. This is the best time for you as a contributor to join if you have a PR pending and want feedback. For the first time we’ve kept minutes of the meeting, what we did and why and you can read up on them here.

the Lotus positions but for a long time I wasn’t able to hold that position for extended periods of time. However, since I’ve switched to working standing up for about 3/4 of my day I’ve noticed a marked improvement in my capability to hold this pose. After just two weeks of doing this I can comfortably hold a pose for 15-20m whereas before at around 10-12m it would start to become unconfortable.

So as I said I would blog regularily, and then I didn’t. That’s because I’m a techy and while working and tweaking the blog I obviously broke it and until now haven’t really found the time to fix it. Just wasn’t at the top of my priority list because all solutions to blogging through Github kinda sucked. Now that it is fixed, lets catch up. Settling in I now have my own space here that I affectionately refer to as home :).