I was a guest on last week’s IT Management Podcast again last week, and we ended up talking a lot about Puppet and the difficulties in running an open source software company.  As always, John Willis and Coté are informed and interesting.  Give it a listen, and maybe subscribe to the whole series.

Yes, I know, I owe you the third and final Puppet history post, and I’ve got a few other posts brewing in there, but, well, I just can’t seem to muster up the energy in the hour or two between the girls going to sleep and my own descent into fearful (of waking babies) slumber.
I’ve [...]

I’m all kinds of snob:  Bike snob, beer snob, whisky snob, shoe snob, pants snob (yes, pants), and much more.  I get called this by friends and family because nearly everything I own I’m particular about — I don’t just buy or wear stuff, I spend too much time researching, deeply assess a purchased object, [...]

I was asked recently for more information on Puppet’s history, and although it seems to me that I’ve talked about it plenty,  I guess I might not have written it all out, nor is it necessarily all in one place.  I’m relatively verbose, so this looks like it will be long enough to break into [...]

Strangely, I’ve heard complaints that I’m focusing too much on the company and not enough on the project, and as a result the product is suffering. I find this strange because the project doesn’t pay my bills, feed my children, or buy my beer, the company does, and without those things, the project itself couldn’t exist. If, instead, I had taken some corporate sysadmin job, I’d have been spending maybe 5-10 hours a week on Puppet, instead of between 10 and 60 hours a week like I’ve been doing for the last three and a half years. This, I think, is the thing that people tend to forget about open source — yes, you can make money doing open source, but in doing so you almost always put yourself in conflict between making money and writing code.

There’s no way to catch up for the last four months or so of not posting at all, so I’m not really going to try.  Instead I’ll just introduce a few of the topics that are taking my brain space, and hopefully they’ll be the impetus to my writing more focused posts later.
Generally, of course, [...]

Yes, I’ve finally posted again, as unlikely as that seems.
My blog has been in need of transitioning for the last few months (it was being hosted by Spike and he needed the server back), and it’s taken me this long to get my act together (although I’ve been a bit busy in the mean time).
I’ll [...]