Daenney's blog

Today I made one of the hardest decisions I’ve made in a while. I decided to give up maintainership of two projects that I originally started. The projects are pypuppetdb, a library to talk to the PuppetDB API, and Puppetboard, a dashboard for PuppetDB that leverages pypuppetdb. Both projects started two years ago during my time at Nedap. The existing open source dashboards for Puppet sort of sucked and none of them were using PuppetDB so we were storing lots of duplicate data and in an inefficient manner too.

After my post on LGBTQ in tech a lot of people reached out to me, thanking me for the post, with a lot of kind words and some even with a resounding “yes that’s me too”. It’s been heartwarming to see the support this story gathered and how the Puppet community, which is the one I interact with the most, reacted to it. Interestingly though some have raised the point that LGBTQ are not a minority in tech.

Most people who know me know I’m gay, or that I identify as gay or queer or whichever way you’re more comfortable phrasing or thinking about it. To put it bluntly: I like men, I date men, I sleep with men, I happen to be a man and it’s all good. The thing that struck me about tech when I started getting more involved in online communities is that no one cared about this fact.

As some of you know I’m the unofficial maintainer of the apt module from Puppetlabs. Together with Morgan from the Puppetlabs Module Team we try and keep that module up to date and in good shape. The apt module has not seen a significant revision since its inception in 2010. Over the past 4 years it has accumulated feature after feature without anyone taking a hard looking at what was going on inside.

Today we had our usual Puppet Module triage. It’s a time a week where module contributors and the Puppetlabs Module Team gather online to discuss, comment, merge or reject PR’s against the different module. This is the best time for you as a contributor to join if you have a PR pending and want feedback. For the first time we’ve kept minutes of the meeting, what we did and why and you can read up on them here.

the Lotus positions but for a long time I wasn’t able to hold that position for extended periods of time. However, since I’ve switched to working standing up for about 3/4 of my day I’ve noticed a marked improvement in my capability to hold this pose. After just two weeks of doing this I can comfortably hold a pose for 15-20m whereas before at around 10-12m it would start to become unconfortable.

So as I said I would blog regularily, and then I didn’t. That’s because I’m a techy and while working and tweaking the blog I obviously broke it and until now haven’t really found the time to fix it. Just wasn’t at the top of my priority list because all solutions to blogging through Github kinda sucked. Now that it is fixed, lets catch up. Settling in I now have my own space here that I affectionately refer to as home :).

I expected to write a post much earlier than this but the first week was so busy all I wanted to do in the evenings was get home and relax, screw the computer. Monday was my first day and it was fun. I got thrown in at the deep end helping to form the squad I’m going to be a member of. Since I’d only been at the company 2.5hrs there was a lot to take in and do all of the sudden.

As some of you know, there’s a big change coming over here. Because of this I decided to throw out the old blog and the content that goes with it, much like I’m throwing out most of my possessions in preparation of what’s to come. The idea is that’ll blog about the new experiences, perhaps sometimes even on a daily basis so that friends and family can keep track of how everything’s going.