A reflection on the fear of publishing imperfect work, the struggle between perfectionism and procrastination, and a lesson learned about soliciting feedback before hitting publish.

After someone made a dick joke on a devops mailing list, a discussion about inclusivity and professionalism in the DevOps community ensued. Here's why it matters.

Notes on workarounds for issues in Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef (2nd Edition), caused by Test Kitchen not yet having a 1.0 release at time of writing.

Thoughts on the second London DevOpsDays conference of 2013, including three recommended video talks and some reflections on the open spaces format.

An experiment in connecting MCollective to Amazon SQS and SNS, and why it turned out to be a poor fit for orchestration use cases.

Version 0.11.0 of the MCollective Chef cookbook brings improved configuration flexibility, updated defaults for MCollective 2.2, and configurable identity.

The x509 cookbook and chef-ssl-client gem automate creating a private Certificate Authority, generating certificate signing requests on Chef nodes, and installing the signed certificates.

A step-by-step guide to building a 32-bit Perl 5.8 on 64-bit CentOS 6 using perlbrew, including the required 32-bit libraries and compiler flags.

A practical test of Chef cookbook reusability, attempting to provision Jenkins, Graphite, and Sensu from community cookbooks on Ubuntu 12.04.

Configuring an IPsec/L2TP VPN server on Ubuntu 12.04 using openswan and xl2tpd, with OS X client considerations for split DNS.