As a puppet consultant I often run into the same problems with multiple clients. Many times I can reuse a magical script and my value instantly becomes obvious. I like to think I have things figured out, but sometimes there are just problems we as a community have not solved yet. The problem I am talking about is hiera validation. Most of us are too busy learning puppet, ruby, markdown, and git that testing is not a priority until your puppet code blows up in your face.

As a long time puppet module developer and puppet consultant I have noticed some trends over the years. Puppet modules are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex. When consuming forge modules I often spend time figuring out how it works and what the developer requires for parameters. Especially when it comes to inserting data into hiera. Schemas help validate the user is doing what the developer intended. Creating a schema might not seem necessary but anybody using your module will greatly appreciate it.

Last week I decided to format my macbook pro after several years of gem and vagrant clutter. My computer was suffering from lag, wasted space, spinning beach balls, and weird crashes. So after I backed up and formatted, I decided I was going to do things differently from now on because starting from scratch is such a pain. Since I had some free time on hand I thought I could take a chance to explore docker as a development environment.

Audience: System Admin, Self taught coder, Computer Scientist Summary: How to leverage puppet-retrospec to generate your puppet unit test suite How many of you remember when the spell checker first came out? It had such a huge impact in everyones life because instantly everyone who used the spell checker appeared as if they had won the international spelling bee. How long did it take you to switch from looking up every single word in a paper dictionary to simply right clicking on a word?

In 2010 my life changed dramatically as I moved from Atlanta, GA to Portland, OR. During this time I maintained a 100% remote position where I controlled twenty unique datacenters all over the country with my computer and a VPN connection. Due to to the nature of the company, problems only seemed to present themselves during the early hours (After 12AM). On several occasions I found the need to turn off a production system due to power or cooling issues.