Thursday, November 13, 2008

Ruby's Pulling Puppet's Strings (and leading people to Ruby)

I've been trying to introduce Ruby at work for a long time, and have had some success here. I've been able to show many of the developers the value of Ruby, and it's made it's way into the organization as a valuable tool. I've never been able to make many inroads into the systems administration team that I work with though, and this has bothered me because I see myself as much more of a sys admin that a programmer. Something's changed recently though. We're working on some new projects, and Puppet is a good model for us to understand how we can automate the configuration of the systems involved. I've been watching Puppet for a while, and even interviewed Luke Kanies (or see his blog, the maintainer of Puppet, and James Turnbull, the author of Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy. Now that some of my co-workers are looking at Puppet, I think they're starting to see the beauty that drew me into Ruby many years ago. I'm looking forward to working with them as we start to build out tools for our new project ... in Ruby. Who knows, maybe I'll even get one or two of them to come to MountainWest RubyConf 2009 with me.

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