I'm not a developer but...

...I'm sure spending a lot of time in code lately.

Really. Over the last five months, I'd say that 80% of my normal working hours are spent grinding on puppet code. Or training others in getting them to maybe do some puppet stuff. I've even got some continuous integration work in, building a trio of sanity-tests for our puppet infrastructure:

  • 'puppet parser validate' returns OK for all .pp files.
    • Still on the 'current' parser, we haven't gotten as far as future/puppet4 yet.
  • puppet-lint returns no errors for the modules we've cleared.
    • This required extensive style-fixes before I put it in.
  • Catalogs compile for a certain set of machines we have.
    • I'm most proud of this, as this check actually finds dependency problems unlike puppet-parser.

Completely unsurprising, the CI stuff has actually caught bugs before it got pushed to production! Whoa! One of these days I'll be able to grab some of the others and demo this stuff, but we're off-boarding a senior admin right now and the brain-dumping is not being done by me for a few weeks.

We're inching closer to getting things rigged that a passing-build in the 'master' branch triggers an automatic deployment. That will take a bit of thought about, as some deploys (such as class-name changes) require coordinated modifications in other systems.