Things Trotter Likes

 

Speaking at ETE
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March 14, 2010
 

Spatula: The Handy Chef Helper

I've been hacking a bit on Spatula (http://github.com/trotter/spatula and http://rubygems.org/gems/spatula). Don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but it's a command line tool packaged as a gem that is supposed to help finding Chef recipes and running chef-solo. It's definitely not fully ready, but it's at least ready enough to start playing around with on ubuntu instances. For instance, you can do something like:

$ spatula search mysql
$ spatula install mysql

This will find all cookbooks on http://cookbooks.opscode.com that match "mysql." It'll then download and install the one called "mysql" into your cookbooks directory. I find it slightly simpler than going through the web interface, downloading a tgz, and extracting it. I want to extend spatula to support other types of sources (like git repos), but haven't done so yet.

Of course, even better than finding cookbooks is getting a new machine up and running. For this purpose, spatula has "prepare" and "cook". Prepare will ssh into the machine and install all the dependencies necessary for chef to actually run. Cook will rsync your cookbooks to the server, ssh in, and run chef-solo to cook the machine. We're using this at Hoopla to successfully build new machines / deploy to them in < 5 minutes. Yea, that's pretty hot.

As an aside, I'm also going to be speaking about Chef at Philly Emerging Tech. It's April 8th and 9th in Philly and has a great speaker lineup.

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February 4, 2010
 

Philly Emerging Tech

Yay! Kyle Burton and I are speaking at Philly Emerging Tech this year. We'll be talking about what we've done at Algorithmics to put together our amazing stack. Seriously, it's pretty cool. We're running Clojure, RabbitMQ, and Rails, doing the bulk of our QA with Cucumber, and currently transitioning our provisioning to Chef. The talk is Living on the Bleeding Edge: A Case Study in Using Clojure, AMQP, Chef, Cucumber and JRuby in the Financial Industry, and I think it'll be really good. I hope to see you there!

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November 7, 2009
 

Pair programming

Photo

I can eat bugz?

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October 28, 2009
 

The Matrix wasn't that far off

(download)

Apparently watching The Matrix had a bigger effect on my coding style
than I previously thought. Here you see automation at work.

Comments [2]

October 22, 2009
 

Our new pairing setup

Photo

Bonnie got us chess clocks to make sure no one hogs the keyboard. Rock!

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October 14, 2009
 

Last Night's Cucumber Presentation

I've put the slides on slideshare. Embed is below.

Unit Tests Aren't Enough

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October 13, 2009
 

Google Building Maker Rocks!

One of the best ways to get a big project done — and done well — is to open it up to the world. As such, today we're announcing the launch of Google Building Maker, a fun and simple (and crazy addictive, it turns out) tool for creating buildings for Google Earth.
via googleblog.blogspot.com

Just tried this out and it's crazy easy. Used it to pretend to make my apartment building slightly better. Obviously, I'll have to get better so that my deck looks right.

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October 13, 2009
 

Ruby Readline

Basic Functionality

Here is the standard Ruby readline sample program:

require 'readline'

while line = Readline.readline('> ', true)
  p line
end

With that you already have your keyboard shortcuts and basic history management. Lets dig into the details and then add features on top of this.

via bogojoker.com

Readline in Ruby is much simpler than I thought. Just added it to cuke-talker.

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October 9, 2009
 

Xpath in Clojure

Cool xpath library for Clojure written by Kyle (and me a little). http://github.com/kyleburton/clj-xpath

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October 6, 2009
 

Cruise Control Builder

We wrote a plugin to build our Rails project for CruiseControl. We needed it because we're using the old school Java Cruise Control. Check it out on github: http://github.com/trotter/cruise_control_builder/fast_forward

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