Food Fight

The Podcast where DevOps chefs do battle

Episode #3, #!/usr/bin/env Ruby # for Sysadmins With John E. Vincent

Recorded February 8, 2012, show length 66 mins download

Guest


John E. Vincent a.k.a. Lusis
Twitter/IRC/GitHub: lusis blog: http://blog.lusis.org

Your Hosts
  • Bryan Berry bryan.berry@gmail.com, Twitter/IRC/GitHub: bryanwb, blog: http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.com
  • Matt Ray matt@opscode.com Twitter/IRC/GitHub: mattray blog: http://leastresistance.net
News & Events

  1. Summary of FOSDEM in Brussels 
  1. tons of openstack and KVM stuff
  2. little Chef content :(, partly bryanwb’s fault
  3. juanje’s work on managing desktops is interesting
  4. Patrick DeBois has a posse
  5. bryanwb’s summary of the event 
  1. ChefConf 2012. Call for papers, registration, sponsors, jobs
  2. CloudConnect next week: talks by Chris Brown & Jesse Robbins
  3. Austin OpenStack Meetup “Chef integration deploying against OpenStack” Feb 16
  4. LA Celebrity Chef Fundamentals Training Feb 21-23
  5. New York Chef Fundamentals Training March 14-16
  6. Lots of cookbook updates this week 
  7. One of Latin America’s largest airlines chooses Chef for their infrastructure 
  8. The world’s #6 retailer uses Chef and OpenStack
  9. SSD7’s awesome post on Shef debugging tricks 
  10. oldie but goodie (still under development), The Cookbook Style Guide, very useful http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Cookbook+Style+Guide+Draft
  11. OpenStack mailing list thread [CHEF] Aligning Cookbook Efforts
  12. New cookbooks by Matt (new squid, annoyances) (updates pxe_dust, apt, bittorrent)
  13. “Incentivizing open source, possible bounty program” e-mail thread


Topic:  Ruby
  1. Why do sysadmins need to learn how to program?
  1. “Alway Be Hacking” by Lusis
  2. bryanwb: the sysadmin job is evolving from technician to engineer
  1. Isn’t bash good enough?
        not really. Not built to do higher-level stuff
  1. How is ruby particularly suited to the tasks of system administration?
  1. easy to get started with
  2. not any more verbose than using bash
  1. What makes Ruby special?
         Python vs. Ruby blog post
  1. What are your favorite features of ruby?
  1. matt: using irb to explore cookbooks
  2. lusis: object introspection
  3. bryanwb: string manipulation and regexes
  1. Talk about the special role of unit and bdd testing in the ruby world and how should we be using ruby testing w/ chef. Cucumber-chef?
        lusis uses minitest
  1. How to get started w/ Ruby? w/ programming?
            lusis: with irb
  1. Books
  1. Enterprise Integration with Ruby 
  2. Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby
  3. The Pickaxe book
  1. Will sysadmins have to shift to a new language 5 years from now>
    • lusis: maybe Go, but that remains to be seen and it doesn’t have Ruby’s DSL capabilities
    • bryanwb: Clojure! but unlikely
  2. JRuby Warbler

Picks
Matt
  1. Web Operations by Allspaw & Robbins
  2. viper mode to use vi keybinding in emacs
  3. tripit-mode for emacs
Bryan
  1. This Sceptered Isle, podcast history of Britain done by BBC4
  2. Delirium Nocturnum, beer from Delirium Cafe in Brussels
Lusis
  1. Remapping caps lock to control
  2. Jagermeister
  3. tripit.com
  4. Clojure for emacs lisp coders who can’t otherwise be employed


Comments

Unknown
Actually, you really should be recommending:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
or:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby1.9