For the past three years at Lookout we’ve hosted an event called “Hacksgiving.” Historically the event has been focused on cool hacks typically oriented around projects or ideas that are internal to Lookout. The first year, for example, a colleague and I prototyped the messaging system that would power our business product the following year. Another group of hackers created the precursor to our signal flare feature that same year (hif I’m remembering correctly).

Earlier on this year I wrote this post as a “mid-season” report on how the little backyard farm (named Croy Family Farms) of mine has been doing. Since that time, in July, I’ve been eagerly waiting to write this post and somewhat “conclude” the 2014 growing season.

This past October I was invited to represent JRuby in the JavaOne 2014 “Script Bowl.” A panel where community members from various projects which implement scripting languages on top of the JVM pitch their language to a live studio audience. This year’s panel consisted of a members from the Groovy, Clojure and Scala communities, and me representing JRuby of course.

This past September I was selected as a speaker at PuppetConf 2014 and given the oppoortunity to talk about some of the patterns that we’ve developed to help run the Jenkins project infrastructure.

My first excursion into the internet or as it was then known by newscasters, the information super highway, was courtesy of the University of Georgia. My mom had gone back to school and as part of her program, there were a number of new-fangled “online classes.” We bought a 28.8 baud modem to go with our Macintosh LC III, in this year it was already 3-4 years old, and used the instructions distributed by the university to set up the Chooser to AppleTalk or some bullshit like that. Mac OS System 7.6 was not very internet friendly.

Followers of mine on Twitter have no doubt seen photos and periodic reports from “Croy Family Farms,” the tongue-in-cheek name of my backyard garden. I’ve not written or chronicled some of the experiences in any amount of depth, despite this (2014) being the third growing season I’ve been gardening. Unlike previous years, this year I’m keeping much better track of what is growing well, what isn’t, and what different plants are yielding (with photos).

Note: I originally posted this here, on the Lookout hackers blog. I encourage you to check the blog out and follow @LookoutEng.

This has already been posted on the Lookout hackers blog but I figured I would repost on my personal blog in lieu of actual content.

The Bay Area transit system is what could be compassionately referred to as a “clusterfuck.” SFMTA, AC Transit, Samtrans, Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit, BART, to name a few of the agencies that immediately come to mind. That’s not counting the agencies that run busses and light-rail further down towards Palot Alto, etc.

Last week, Kohsuke and I participated in a Puppet training and consulting event on behalf of the Jenkins project. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, we both had some amount of Puppet knowledge going into the sessions, but neither of us had actually deployed a puppet master before, let alone used the Puppet Enterprise Console. I’ve written good bits of Puppet code, I’ve not made good use of Puppet though.

For one of my newer projects at Lookout, I’ve been experimenting with Elasticsearch as the primary data store. The advantages of Elasticsearch are many for my particular use-case, but one of the things I particularly like about it is the distributed nature of its design.

All over my body I feel warm, my eyes dart left, to the fully extended wind sock, back to my panel, and then straight ahead. A couple hundred feet before the displaced threshold I line up on the centerline and slowly advance the power. The airplane starts accelerating down the runway, I sit mesmerized for a moment at the sight before remembering who’s at the controls.

As a long-time user of both Puppet and Jenkins, it should not be terribly surprising to readers that I’m creator of the most downloaded puppet-jenkins module on Puppet Forge.

Reunited with an old friend, the Ugly Duckling, I finish my engine start checklist and the Duckling roars alive. Unlike some of my lessons over the summer, the plane gives me no trouble starting up.

Update: I will unable to be in Yurp the entire month of February due to some changes in my work schedule :(

We begin our descent towards Santa Rosa, lined up for runway 32 with strong headwinds and a warning of moderate turbulence from the tower.

Pulling my laptop out of my bag this past Friday, I was excited with the prospect of a good relaxing day of hacking on whatever I pleased. Having fulfilled the Thanksgiving family obligations, and negotiated an errand-free day with my wife, I was pretty excited about a full day of tinkering.

Santa Rosa’s current conditions are overcast with plenty of fog. The forecast and the weather brief confirm that it should start to clear up around 10-11am.

After a week of utterly painful patience, my wife and I were finally able to get up in the air this morning, undertaking our first flight together with my new private pilot’s license.

One of my favorite aviation sayings is “you start with a bag full of luck and an empty bag of experience. The trick is to fill the bag of experience before you empty the bag of luck.”