nigelk's comments

We very much encourage people to use the package repositories we host:

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/puppetlabs_package_reposit...

Are you suggesting we should drop gem support entirely andyl?

Great news Mitch! Congratulations, and give us a yell if I can help with anything.

I'd love to see more details about this. You may not return to this comment, but [email protected] would love to chat about what you're doing here.

In Australia where in many ways it felt like we were second-hand consumers of UK rave/dnb culture, the "digital" was a big part of that experience in the early 90s.

Think of all the newsgroups, mailing lists and blogs. Think hyperreal.org and the community around all that.

The music itself may not have spread digitally as we saw from the mid-90s onwards, but discussion of the music certainly did.

And here you've nicely summarized why I think I've seen so many technically-inclined philosophy grads working as sysadmins...

Totally a case of selection bias, given I'm one of those and notice them, but I've long been convinced that a love of systems creation and debugging is the common attribute between philosophers and sysadmins.

Snippets at Google had one other really useful tool when you're a large company.

You could subscribe to a keyword, and pick up any snippets that mentioned it.

As someone who was running a service that could get in the way of engineers doing their job, this was a great way to get honest, grassroots info.

This is awesome. As an ex-Googler at a startup, I've been wanting to re-implement OSS snippets for a while now. Checking it out!

I don't.

I'm one of those Australians who moved to the US to work at Google, and then left to join a startup, Puppet Labs.

There are a lot of Australians in tech in the Bay Area, particularly working in operations, and a regular topic of conversation is "what would I do if I moved back to Australia?"

I'd still probably try to start a new tech company in the US, but I feel much less strongly about that than I did a couple of years ago, and hopefully that trend continues.

I quite like the command line tooling GCE comes with. It's a much nicer user experience.

From memory this was due to LaunchServices not waiting until the home directory was completely mounted, and thus launching with default prefs.

There was a workaround I had running for a while in a large deployment in the form of a logouthook that would copy the relevant prefs to a location that LaunchServices would find it before FileVault finished mounting the home directory.

There were a lot of corporate/education deployments running "legacy" FileVault who hadn't invested in PGP WDE or other commercial options, and I bet they haven't all upgraded instantly to the new FileVault when they moved to Lion.

If you've got 2-factor set up on your Google account, you'll get prompted for it when you set up Google Drive.

Work/Life balance is very important to us. Lots of us here at Puppet Labs have young families, and being flexible in that regard is really important.

Living in Portland helps a lot too. I moved up from the Bay Area and my previous job because Portland is a much better place to raise a young family. Much cheaper rent/housing, good public transport, better schools, it all added up to a much better life for my whole family.

It is easy to fall into the trap of imagining all enterprise environments are like your own, and even when "special snowflake syndrome" is based on a false assumption, there are huge differences globally in terms of dominant OSes, even if you only think about Linux.

The original author is largely correct when it comes to the US in my opinion though. That subset of OSes does cover the vast majority of US enterprises on Linux.

I can't always map Hacker News personas to people on the list :) so anyone, please feel free to ping me directly about this sort of thing:

[email protected]

I absolutely agree.

Not being able to externalize data has had a huge effect upon sharing modules.

Our plan for the next major release of Puppet this year is to integrate Hiera deeply into Puppet in a more native manner.

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/hiera

We're still building out the plan, and will be sending it out to the community soon for comment, but the basic idea is that parameterized class parameter lookup will automatically consult a hierarchical store like Hiera if values are not supplied directly.

Much like Hiera has now, there will also be an easy function to grab arbitrary data values outside of class parameters.

Thanks for the positive words.

I'm not going to pretend we've got the Free Software business model perfectly sorted either.

We're producing proprietary software as well as developing/curating open source software projects, and there is a balancing act involved there.

Not to sound too bandwagon-jumpy (I've found the recent hyperbolic public outpouring of grief somewhat distasteful) but I care about user experience and documentation, and I've always believed that focusing on the end user will lead you in the right direction.

http://puppetlabs.com/blog/what-is-user-experience-in-puppet...

We're looking for more UX staff, and have an open UX Designer role right now actually...

http://puppetlabs.jobscore.com/jobs/puppetlabs/ux-designer/b...

Those are all good points, and we know the layout needs to improve.

I would add though that once you've gone through the basics, you find yourself primarily living in the Type Reference, which is arranged alphabetically.

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/stable/type.html

Always happy to get bug reports, feature requests and feedback on the docs...

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet-docs

"The business model of the companies promoting Puppet and Chef seems to be to charge for support and/or hosted services. Which is fine. But is it leading to abysmal documentation?"

This is one of the reasons we're moving Puppet Labs from being a support company to a product company, and not for hosted services.

If your bread and butter comes in from support, you have no incentive to actually make your product easier to use. There are plenty of enterprise-y software companies who make lots of money operating like this, but that's not the sort of company I want to work for.

I'm quite proud of the rapid improvement we've made on the Puppet Docs over the last year since we hired NickF, our most excellent tech writer:

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/

I particularly like the solution focused docs he's done, as opposed to the dry reference material that presupposes a lot of knowledge.

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/

Anyway, just wanted to point out that that's not our business model.

(Product Manager at Puppet Labs)

We (Puppet Labs) take interns from PSU and have hired pro services engineers from there.

Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear there.

From the viewpoint of interviewer and hirer rather than interviewee, I thought the process was better than anywhere else I've worked.

I liked the expected level of rigor, I liked the decisions being made by a separate committee, and I liked the salary package being set by yet another group.

The main problems I saw were: * recruiters dropping the contact chain with the candidate * interviewers not preparing enough * not enough of a feedback cycle to interviewers about their performance.