Posts

My experience A couple of months ago, while searching google for some odd python syntax, I received an invitation. I documented my code progress and experience over the following week in a GitHub repository as I solved each one of the problems. This was a ton of fun! What is the Google Foobar Challenge Google Foobar challenge is a set of programming challenges. It is reported that Google has used this as recruiting tool to find candidate developers to hire. (Indeed, there’s a recruitme command available once you reach the upper levels.) It consists of a (somewhat contrived) sci-fi adventure story where you are the hero trying to stop an evil antagonist from destroying a planet solving programming challenges of increasing difficulty to advance the plot. ...

The problem In the process of modernizing our puppet infrastructure, I’ve been able to remove/delete many of the custom modules I had written many years ago and use community developed and supported modules from the puppet forge. Many of these modules accommodate a pattern of a single include in the manifest, and putting all the site-specific configuration data (if any) in hiera. That said, some don’t allow this, and resources must be explicitly configured. In the past, we’ve used create_resources in combination with hiera lookups. ...

Motivation I was creating a TextFSM template, and was disappointed with the lack of syntax highlighting support for this filetype in my favorite text editor. Typically, this is just a plugin away, but an exhaustive search turned up nothing. So, like all good geeks, I rolled up my sleeves and made one myself. Process Over the years, I have written little snippets in my .vim/syntax/ directory, or added some missing syntax to someone else’s syntax plugin, but had never written one from scratch. ...

The Problem A common issue with infrastructure as code, is that it is often possible for someone to go in after deployment and manually change things. I still want to preserve the ability for the infrastructure folks to go in and make emergency changes, but I also want to discourage this practice as much as possible. To this end, I’ve been using a pattern where any “out of band” changes are alerted to the rest of the team. That way, everyone can be aware there was a change made, and can go back afterwards and follow the standard procedures for the change. ...