Grinding Gears

I was a researcher in chemistry in my previous career, so I have a habit of labelling everything. It is important in chemistry to be organised; you don’t want to mix unknown liquids in unlabeled beakers. Can you guess why? BOOM! I apply this habit in every area of my life. Now, everything has a place and is clearly labelled. I have a place for vertically striped socks and a… Continue reading

We’ve all been there - it’s a couple of days or even the night before an important deadline and one of the following happens: You lose your memory stick with all your work on it and scramble to recreate it but can’t get it back to the way it was.You make some more ‘advancements’ to your work and suddenly everything is broken and you can’t seem to get it back… Continue reading

Lots of our infrastructure is managed by Puppet, the open source configuration management tool that uses its own domain specific language (DSL) to describe how services, files and systems should look. The DSL was inspired by Nagios configuration files, so you’ll find lots of nested blocks under curly braces, indentation, groups of parameters assigned with => separators, all of which can begin to look messy in a large manifest, as… Continue reading