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.