In the meantime, here’s my quarterly blog post.

I was finally able to attend an Ubuntu Developer Summit last month, this time in Dallas (not quite as nice a location as the last one – Barcelona).  My reason for being there was that they had 3 or 4 sessions devoted to Puppet-related concepts, and they wanted upstream (that would be me) to provide some insight and get involved in getting the work done.

It was a really interesting and different conference.  I’ve actually participated in other UDSes in the past via phone and IRC, and now that I’ve been to the conference, I realize how structural that remote participation is, and I’d love to copy it as we hold more Puppet conferences (e.g., the PuppetCamp Europe we’re planning for next year).  Every room had a session-specific IRC channel, plus live streaming video and audio, so you really could participate from anywhere in the world.  The last UDS, I could hear an audio stream and would type on IRC my responses to questions.  It was a bit awkward, but it meant I could actually be involved.

I think the focus on coming away with action plans is another thing that sets UDS apart.  So many other conferences are the destination – get your talk written, your presentation presented, and then drink and talk all week.  While there’s lots of drinking and talking at UDS – there was a really lively bar scene, I think partially because there’s so little hallway track — the sessions are really focused on “we’re all in the same city for a week, let’s knock this out”.

That’d be another great takeaway, but it’s hard to know how to copy it without having thousands of motivated, active, involved community members, like Ubuntu does.  I might decide to try for something like its blueprints in a one-day pre-PuppetCamp session or something; I like the idea of a “get shit done” focus for at least part of any conference.

In terms of how it affects Puppet, it’s a couple of different ways.  Since Puppet is now in Ubuntu Main, they are concerned about the long-term support of whatever we release, because they have to support it for five years.  They’re also looking at integrating it into various aspects of the system, and in particular, etckeeper and the installer.  So far, Ubuntu is the only OS out there that I’ve seen really look for ways to integrate a CM system into the heart of the OS.  As they should be, they’re taking baby steps, but those steps are clearly harbingers for what’s to come.

The etckeeper integration is not something you’d use in a normal environment, but I could see how it could be useful for some cases.  It’d kind of be a filebucket on steriods.

The goal of the installer integration would be, at the least, to make sure that you could have a complete functional machine once out of the installer, so Puppet would need to be able to run chroot’d by the installer.  We also talked about converting the catalog into a format that the installer can understand — essentially a preseed file — which would allow the installer to take care of the majority of the package installs, which would be much faster on the first big run.

Hopefully both of these integrations will yield great results, and either way, it was a great conference and I hope that we and Canonical/Ubuntu continue finding interesting things to work on together.

We’ve had talks by Ohad Levy on The Foreman, Brice Figureau on StoreConfigs, Paul Nasrat on Facter, and James Turnbull on developing Puppet.  After the talks yesterday, we split up into self-organized sessions, which are always my favorite — everyone’s far more involved, and you know just about everyone is getting something from every session.

The conference has been successful enough that I’m confident we’ll have more of them.  Next time, though, we’ll skip the catering and spend the extra money on getting a location closer to the city center.

First I’m on a configuration management panel run by James Turnbull at the Open Source Bridge in Portland, OR.  I haven’t been on a multiple-tool panel in a while, so this should be interesting.  I’m also excited to be back in Portland – I absolutely love the town, so much that I’m moving back there this summer.  And for those non-Americans who think we don’t make great beer:  Get thyself to Portland, and see how wrong you are.  I should also be running a Puppet BoF there.

From there I fly down to San Jose to give a workshop on Puppet at the O’Reilly Velocity conference.  This is its second year, and while it claims to have a web operations/performance focus, I think it stands to quickly become the best general operations conference around.  LISA is too academic and just moves too slowly, and there isn’t a whole lot of other competition.

Last year’s was great, and this year’s is a day longer and looks to be even better.

Finally, the day after Velocity, I attend Om Malik’s Structure.  This conference is more focused on operations executives, which is a very different focus for me, but I met a lot of interesting and knowledgeable people there last year, including some from completely outside the technology space.  I normally diss executive events, but this one seems to stand out.

Hopefully you’ll have a chance to track me down at one of these events.

Except not at LISA.  Check a Twitter Search, for example — very few twitterers, almost none about the actual sessions, and no visibility within LISA of any twittering.  Or blogging.  This is the first conference I’ve gone to in ages that didn’t have a standard tag mentioned for blogging et al, which makes it hard to find blogs about a conference named ‘LISA’.  Technorati finds 7 results, but most of those seem to be about a completely different conference.

It’s very frustrating, because it’s still one of the best conferences to go to as a sysadmin (although Velocity is quickly becoming better), but the attendees don’t seem to be pushing the conference, and the conference definitely isn’t pushing the attendees.

I’m once again friends with the guy running the conference, Adam Moskowitz, so hopefully I can pressure him into making it a bit more online somehow.  I’m not sure there’s much he can do, though — he needs to somehow get the community interested, and one thing we’ve pretty clearly established is that we don’t have much of a community.

TripIt integration on LinkedIn

TripIt is my very favorite travel-related web site — I forward all of my confirmations to them and they automatically build a schedule with all of the confirmation codes and everything.  I print a copy of this out, and I always have everything I need to know where and when to be on a trip, and I can always prove I have a reservation without relying on ‘net access.  It also makes it easy to manage all the trips I take, which is important since I traveled more than 75k miles this year.

I’m pretty excited about this integration – I’m hoping it will make LinkedIn a bit more useful, and add some Dopplr-like serendipity to my LinkedIn network.

I realize now that my excitement over this integration is a bit irrational; that’s most likely because my fondness for TripIt is a bit irrational — it makes travel organization trivial, they’re fabulous in response to feedback, and I just really like the product.