You might not be surprised to know that among my many views and opinions, I have given serious consideration to writing instruments. While much of my day is consumed by typing away on the keyboard, I carry no fewer than three notebooks with me at all times, filling each with tasks, ideas, designs, and so on. The paper notebook for me is a scratchpad for my own thought process. There are numerous spiral bound pages in my office which hold early designs for many of the products I have built, and probably more from those more crazy designs which I was not able to build.

A link was sent my way to the Redis Labs “Commons Clause”, which definitely raised my eyebrow. While the Commons Clause, as defined by Redis Labs, does not apply to Redis itself, it is applied to their non-closed source software.

Somehow I have been blogging for over eleven years now. When I first registered unethicalblogger.com it more or less a joke in response to a deluge of holier-than-thou rhetoric about the “ethics of blogging”, as if it were anything more than soap-boxing on the internet.

1. Configuration languages are too complex; YAML is much simpler and easier to understand.
2. Declarative YAML configuration is brilliant.
3. Lots of our things look similar, we have too much copy and pasted YAML.
4. We’ve written a tool which uses templates and parameters to dynamically generate our YAML
5. The declarative YAML format now supports conditional, iteration, and inheritance syntax; it is now turing complete.

This year I have started to see a new buzzword get thrown around, one which I can feel especially hipstery about: GitOps. While the folks over at WeaveWorks have made the term fashionable in the Kubernetes ecosystem, stodgy old-timer Puppet users might recognize the same practices they’ve used for a few years now by combining R10k and Git. In fact, I was first introduced to the concept by Gary Larizza, an absolutely loud, foul-mouthed, and wonderful hacker. The concepts Gary blogged about I rapidly introduced to the Jenkins project’s own Puppet-based infrastructure. This blog post isn’t about how sunglasses-at-night cool all us Puppet users have been, but instead I wished to clarify some areas where “GitOps” as a practice falls short, and what is needed to compensate.

The wind carries the spring
along the roadside
down, over, and through the hills.

I recently came across this post from Nick Heer castigating “the bullshit web.” A term he uses to describe the fairly despicable state of modern web applications. While I overwhelmingly agree with the points he lays out, especially in his disparaging remarks towards AMP, I think there’s more to be said about alternative approaches for web users to once again experience the web without the bullshit.

With the latest (quantum!) releases of Firefox, a number of things changed for the better but one of the few things that seemed to get worse was the Open File dialog. I tend to use the dialog quite frequently to open up HTML generated reports from test and coverage tooling, and with the newer Firefox versions I had become very frustrated with the mouse-heavy requirements to use the dialog.

Living in Northern California has taught me many valuable lessons, but perhaps the most fundamental has been to appreciate high quality food. This appreciation was further enhanced when I started a garden, and began to savor freshly grown, vine-ripened, fruits and vegetables. Providing a strong counter-example, my travels to areas without great access to either fresh ingredients or strong culinary culture (strip malls, strip malls everywhere), usually results in a change in my own well-being. An upset stomach really hammers home the importance of high-quality food.

Over the past seven years, the Jenkins project has been an associate project with an umbrella 501(c)3 organization called Software in the Public Interest (SPI). Debian, PostgreSQL, and a number of other associate projects utilize SPI as a legal entity with which they can collect donations and assign intellectual property, such as trademarks. For the past few months I have been coming up to speed as an interim director on the board, replacing a seat vacated, but now I’m running for the seat in the 2018 board election