[chef] Re: striving toward perfection

[Sascha Bates < >]

You are absolutely right.  I'm not going to argue with any of that 
sentiment. A lot of the stuff we do hurts me and some of the stuff i see 
our dev teams do makes me want to cry.  I've been with this client 2 
months now and I have a long list of things I'd like to improve or turn 
around.

But when you're building a house where the barn used to be, sometimes 
you have to shovel some shit before you can lay down the hardwood floors 
or install the Viking appliances. We currently travel around a lot by 
the command line and that's not going to change in the next month or 
three. The easier I make that, the more brain cycles I free up for 
important work.

We're a team of 8 serving hundreds of people; our backlog of cards 
stretches into infinity. I think we have 3 agile dev teams and about 15 
more that are like, "wtf are all these tools and why do I have to know 
chef to write Java?"  Friday I spent 4 hours walking two devs through 
setting up their private chef orgs and syncing 4 separate cookbook 
repos. Saturday I spent the morning writing a Jenkins job that automates 
the sync. Today I'll likely try to reconcile the openstack VM build we 
have to work with Private Chef and pray that I get a means of writing 
automated org creation soon as well.

It's strangely fun and satisfying bring the devops and automation gospel 
to the enterprise. But it's def not the same as building beautiful 
things from scratch.

#lifeintheenterprise




Sascha Bates | 
  | 612 850 0444 | 

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On 10/22/12 2:48 AM, Brad Knowles wrote:
> On Oct 21, 2012, at 7:56 PM, Sascha Bates 
> <
>  >
>  wrote:
>
> > And if we lived in a perfect world, I'm sure we'd never need to ssh anywhere 
> > and could just sit in the middle of an interactive matrix like Tony Stark.  
> > Regardless, this is an active development environment and we are in and out 
> > of Jenkins slaves and development team VMs, and just generally being the 
> > diagnostic fixit guys.  The information doesn't always come to you. Sometimes 
> > you have to go to the information. And while I get a lot of information from 
> > the Jenkins GUI, sometimes there's no substitute for going out and looking at 
> > something.
> Just because you don't live in a perfect world is no reason to avoid working 
> towards making your world more perfect.
>
> Each time you have to manually ssh out to a given node to find or fix some 
> problem, you should be asking yourself what you can do to help make this 
> information available through other -- more automated -- means.  The next 
> time you have to do that same sort of thing, you should be asking yourself 
> that same question again.  By the third or fourth time, you should probably 
> be working towards having something in place to do that instead so that there 
> is unlikely to be a fifth or sixth time, at least for that particular type of 
> problem.
>
> You don't want to go around manually doing all the same sorts of things every 
> time, because that doesn't leave you any room to be able to scale your 
> infrastructure, or react to successfully handle serious problems.  That 
> probably also would not be conducive to your mental or physical health, 
> either.
>
>
> You don't have to have everything automated, everywhere, from Day One.  But 
> you should at least work towards the goal of having the right things 
> automated in the right way -- and for the right reasons.
>
> > Or possibly I'm the only person who doesn't work in a perfect world. Everyone 
> > else, back to your regularly scheduled Ironman Matrix.
> Speaking only for myself, it's unlikely to be like Iron Man.  It's more 
> likely to be like Edison -- 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, and learning 
> many thousands of different ways to *not* make a lightbulb.  But there will 
> hopefully be a few interesting/useful inventions and discoveries along the 
> way.
>
> I just hope we can have better working conditions, and avoid getting into 
> nasty politics and lawsuits, etc... over who invented what and whose version 
> of which thing is really the better thing.
>
> --
> Brad Knowles 
> <
>  >
> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>