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This looks great! I think I may pre-order, but I’m only a bit hesitant. I know Apple brought some of the bigger ARM-on-desktop news... is the future already here (or in a few short months)? How’s life on ARM’d Debian?

Tend to agree. Leadership needs to send strong, clear signals about quality and acknowledge existence of potential technical debt well before the team starts feeling crushed by it.

I like GitLab and GitHub quite a bit, but I lean toward GitLab for the simplicity of a unified tool chain.

However, I think GitLab can only really shine when you host it yourself. In 2020, on-premise/self-managed anything is kind of a hard sell, but the reliability and performance of gitlab.com leaves a lot to be desired. (So much so, I often think about trying to work for GitLab so I could help from a reliability perspective.) I stuck my neck out for GitLab in a previous organization and we ended up migrating from github.com to gitlab.com. This set me up for some embarrassment for every outage they experienced last year which felt surprisingly frequent. But if you have the resources, self-managed GitLab is great!

tl;dr: gitlab.your.org > github.com > gitlab.com

In my experience, GitLab's MR UI really lacks performance when the diffs pass a certain length. Similarly sized diffs in GitHub don't seem to have this problem, though.

I think of it as additional incentive to maintain smaller patches for ease of review, but sometimes changes are necessarily large due to complexity. It can be obnoxious to be hamstrung like this.

That’s an interesting point, but Hashicorp does a fair bit more than just Terraform.

Our health benefits startup has been using Clojure in production for some time. Efforts are ongoing to migrate the last bits from other JVM languages to Clojure, but ClojureScript is already ubiquitous.

I’ve worked with Puppet, Ansible, and Salt professionally in the past few years. Of the three, I’m unsure which I’d choose for greenfield, but I think I would rather inherit a legacy Salt codebase than one in Puppet or Ansible.

I’ve recently learned that some actually do consider mocking harmful.

Where I work right now, there’s a really outdated and unfashionable fight over the benefit of unit testing in general. Existing engineers don’t see value in test driven development, exhaustive testing, unit testing, and mocks/spies are thrown in... and we’re a python shop. I’m utterly confused. I, too, grew concerned after reading–will I be hearing this cited/twisted as further evidence against investing in our dreadful testing situation?

I'll hopelessly upvote and/or comment any positive mentions of WebOS. I still miss the Palm Pre.

I loved my Palm Pre.

"If you are willing and able to offer sponsorship, reach out to me at marcuslager at the biggest email provider in the world * dot com."

Is that still yahoo.com?

I'm really interested in applying. Would it be alright if I reach out via freenode?

I had imagined this would be for neovim only... not so. This looks great!

Nexus isn’t a terrible option, but the application feels pretty dated from a deployment and maintenance perspective. We’re using it for ruby gems and internal docker registry. I haven’t looked into viable alternatives for the gems side of things—that works well enough—but we’re replacing the docker registry with gitlab.

That jelly keyboard was incredible. If there were a competitive Pre on the market today, I'd buy.

My brother purchased the Pixie. It was kind of neat, too, but... that rubberized backing started pealing off and it started to get pretty gross.

I thought the very basis of continuous integration/delivery was the same build moving through various stages of readiness and environments until it’s delivered to production, automatically and continuously. In short, if it’s called continuous delivery, that’s about the only way the process could be setup with containers and still be called CD. Or am I mistaken?

Not your point, but I guess it may Be little different for the Chef experts if container pipelines are defined with Packer.io using Chef provisioners.

Was considering this model... then I bought a GalliumOS-capable Chromebook for $180 bucks. It's not for everyone, but I think it's going to replace my RevA Retina MBP. ~20 hours of battery life, more than enough power to run Alacritty tmux'd SSH sessions to cloud infrastructure. Did I mention that it was $180?

I am not ashamed to admit that I felt the same way for a time. I don't know when things changed, but it started to click recently, and I actually like yaml. I guess that it helps that it has become rather ubiquitous in our build tools between cloud-init, puppet hieradata, and ansible roles/playbooks.

What hasn't been helpful is what others here and elsewhere have reminded me time and time again... "JSON is a subset of yaml"

I think the default settings for puppet agents are typically 30 minutes if I'm not mistaken. I've inherited a bit of a DevOps mess with some 600-700 nodes in various states of management.

In previous positions, there was a great hew and cry that the run intervals were increased from 30 minutes to 60 minutes... eventually every four hours for production resources.

In my current position, production nodes are provisioned to run puppet once daily as a rule, triggered by cron jobs at a pseudorandom minute between 0200 and 0400 defined at server provisioning time.

How do these intervals compare to what you've seen?

I'm not so sure about this. My experience has been limited, but so far, Terraform has been a treat to work with. I didn't think Terraform cared about where the resources were defined in a the plan step. I'd love for someone with further experience to weigh in here.

Also, Terraform state on the file system? Do you have the luxury of solo development without the need for a Terraform remote backend?

I don't think there is any shortage of literature on the need to avoid vendor lock-in. Selecting a cloud agnostic tool like those developed by Hashicorp and the opensource community offers the folks at 1Password additional flexibility in their choice of cloud providers. AWS is great, but still...

I don't see any mention of Terraform Enterprise here, either. I imagine they're perfectly capable of pursuing Terraform with the foss version, although the enterprise complement has some pretty great additional features.

Any recommendations toward primers and getting started with k8s?

Not the op, but I have some brief thoughts.

Given a bit of time with Terraform, the need for modules becomes obvious as you identify common resources for the infrastructure you're modeling. I thought writing modules first was the "right way," but starting with modules ended up being a waste.

This is a really important point. Our company is using Terraform in a limited way, but Puppet is our primary automated configuration management tool. Similarly in Puppet, `ensure => latest,` on package resources isn't necessarily dangerous, but it can add a lot of confusion without intentional commits against the control repositories.

I took the plunge, but it's barely a plunge at all. I purchased an open box Acer at Microcenter for $180 bucks. Sadly, this model only comes with a 32GB drive and no capacity to upgrade it, but I don't really care. If I like this way of computing well enough, I may spring for a slightly more expensive model. But at under $200, I didn't have much to lose. Thanks for the detailed advice.

So far, I'm really impressed by Gallium. I understand why some might raise some exception with even more fragmentation in yet another software distribution, but it really does make sense in this case, especially with the touch screen on this model.

I'm comfortable with Debian variants, but most of my work is in enterprise linux, and I might be nice to run something closer on my laptop... but with containers and VMs, maybe it doesn't really matter anymore. I'll do some more soul searching because this is a serious contender for my dollars.

This sounds pretty good, actually. The trouble I have is that I'm looking to spend some good money on a laptop, but I think it's ultimately going to disappoint; why should I spend 2-3K on a laptop that only check x/y boxes where x < y? Maybe I'm just unreasonable.

Is there a particular model you'd suggest from there? Thanks in advance!

I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been to the Dell website many times and I've become lost. It feels like a 90s era eCommerce website and that I'm configuring last year's model every time I go there -- does this[1] look right?

[1] http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-netbooks-an...