Productivity, finally

We're adopting Puppet as a configuration management system, but to date most of the work has been done by my co-worker, Digant Kasundra, and my only involvement has been getting briefed on how it works by the author and discussing theory and implementation with him. We're warming up to a very aggressive timeframe for starting to use it to manage all of our systems at work and deploying an infrastructure system using it is on the short list of things that I have to get done before my October vacation. Last night, I finally started writing Puppet configurations and getting into the rhythm of it, and all of today was devoted to working on Puppet.

This was extremely successful. I think some of that is focus and the willingness to simply ignore parts of work not related to the thing that I'm trying to get done. Another success factor was a complete lack of meetings today. At the end of the day today, I've ported pretty much everything our current Debian build system does after the initial build into Puppet, discussed implementation strategies for some additional features that we'll be contracting for, implemented the initial Postfix configuration, and started keeping notes on the things I still need to deal with. Most importantly, I think I have a handle on what the overall shape is going to look like (although getting support for overriding classes is going to be critical for us).

It's nice to reach the point in a major project like this where we've committed to the implementation technology. Nothing is every perfect and everything requires local customization, so there's always a long, uncertain initial period where I'm not sure if we're going the right route, I see a lot of different possibilities, and I'm not positive we're jumping in the right direction. When we commit, it takes a lot of the stress away and produces a sea change in how I look at the tools. Now, Puppet is something we're simply going to make work, and if it doesn't do what we want, we change it until it does.

This means that I now need to learn Ruby. I think learning Objective CAML just got pushed back farther again.