June 2014 Archives

Remnants of a Deeper YAPC

This year I attended my third YAPC.  As always, here are my thoughts.

General bits and bobs: I thought the venue was pretty decent.  It’s definitely the best hotel showers I’ve ever had: excellent water pressure and never even a hint of running out of hot water.  Perhaps they have on-demand heaters.  I could have used more open plugs in the room, but that’s a minor complaint.  The wifi was pretty awful, as usual—one person even did a lightning announcement suggesting we complain about it.  I didn’t see the point, personally.  Several hundred geeks, most with multiple devices, plus several dozen spouses, partners, and children,1 all descending on a single location for four days ... hell, that could break anybody’s router.  And I don’t think it’s particularly reasonable to ask a place that can comfortably house all those people to maintain a super-network year-round that will only really get used once a year.  Just point your laptop at your cell phone instead and move on with life, I say.

As always, I met several new folks this year.  A special shout-out to Kevin, Alan, and uncanny_kate, who shared former employers with me and were willing to commiserate.2  I also had a great conversation with scrottie, a game of Munchkin with two German fellows named Thomas and Alex, and got introduced to Ann.3  And I got to see plenty of other folks that I’d had fun hanging out with at previous YAPC’s, including the Slashdot guys (2/3 of whom I also share former employers with), and spq_easy, who I helped interview once at a former employer.  Socially, it was a ball, despite the fact that many of us geeks (myself included) can be painfully shy in many social situations.

Talk-wise, there were good and bad sides.  On the bad side, I missed some of my favorite speakers, like Piers Cawley, Ingy, schwern, and chromatic.  On the other hand, I got to see mst speak twice, which is always entertaining, and Sawyer X twice, who is rapidly becoming one of my new favorite speakers.  If I had to pick one talk as the absolute best of the conference, Sawyer X’s “The Joy in What We Do” wins it, hands down.  If you choose only one YAPC video to watch because you couldn’t make it this year (and you’re silly enough to listen to my advice), choose this one.  It was the best keynote of the conference.

When a failure is not a failure

[What I really should have done here is something like Tom Wyant or Joel Berger.  Being a literary type, that appeals to me.  Of course, with Dupin and Holmes taken, who would I pay homage to? Nero Wolfe, perhaps? Batman? Michael Westen? Harry Dresden?

Anyways, maybe next time, if I have more time to prepare.  For now, you’ll have to settle for plain ol’ me.]

At $work, I’m the guy who maintains the tool we use for branching, merging, pushing ... release management, I suppose you’d say.  I don’t actually do the pushes most of the time, but I’m usually the guy who takes the tickets when there’s something wrong with the process.

At the end of the push, we build a new AMI.  That’s Amazon-speak for a master virt which we can clone to bring up new production machines quickly.  By making a new one after every push, any new instances we bring up will automatically have the latest code on them.  Recently, my coworker doing the push reported that the AMI build failed.  Well, he clarified: it says it failed, although it actually looked like it succeeded.  Probably a transient error, I assured him (with fingers crossed).  But, no such luck: the next week, the same thing happened.  This time my coworker figured out what underlying command the release management script was running and ran it by hand.  Yep, it definitely succeeds, he reported.  It just says it failed.

About Buddy Burden

user-pic 14 years in California, 25 years in Perl, 34 years in computers, 55 years in bare feet.