alterconf was excellent. I tend to find even the most rewarding of conference-going experiences exhausting due to “the noise! and the people!”. alterconf was very different for me. The fact that it is a single-track conference likely had a lot to do with my great experience. (1) More than that, though, the work Ashe Dryden and her colleagues do to make alterconf a diverse and inclusive space also make it a space that enables attention.

Read On →

I gave a talk at Seattle alterconf last weekend called “So You Want to Get Started in Open Source: Advice for the Non-Normative”. As usual when I research and write a talk, I end up with way more interesting material than I can fit into the time allotted. In this case, since most of the things I read are readily available online, I decided to post a list of my references.

Read On →

A couple of people in my office hours at chefconf expressed interest in my knife/chef/ruby setup, so I said I’d write a blog post with a few more details. To be clear, this is me sharing my extremely opinionated setup with people who asked, and not me speaking as an employee of Chef. I expect to be dogfooding chefdk for cookbook development, but don’t currently have any substantive opinions about it.

Read On →

Putting the list of talks I attended yesterday at casitconf here so that I can find it again: David Blank-Edelman’s keynote,“Tales from the bottom of the wishing well, or Why sysadmins still matter” Jordan Sissel, “Loving your logs with logstash” Scott Whyte, “An OpenFlow based Internet Exchange Point” Ben Kero, “LXC (Linux containers) Introduction Plus Stupid (and useful!) Tricks” Nicole Forsgren Velasquez and Carolyn Rowland, “Usenix Women in Advanced Computing Panel” Nathen Harvey, “5 Things You Always Wanted to Know About Chef But Were Afraid to Ask“ Leon Towns-von Stauber, “Truth:  On Machine Epistemology and the Importance of Dependencies“ Lightning talks.

Read On →