appearances

The following is a transcript of the content in my AnsibleFest Atlanta 2019 session, There's a role for that! How to evaluate community roles for your playbooks.

• Presentation slides
• Presentation video

Introduction

I'm Jeff Geerling, I wrote a book on Ansible (Ansible for DevOps), I have used Ansible on an almost daily basis for hundreds of different projects since 2013, and I now work with Red Hat's Ansible team as a technical contractor.

Some people wonder ask how teams can be productive while maintaining many applications on a variety of cloud providers. One of the key reasons is reliance on Ansible content contributed and maintained by others.

Last year, at AnsibleFest Austin 2018, I presented Make your Ansible playbooks flexible, maintainable, and scalable. All the sessions at AnsibleFest were recorded, and I thought I'd be doubly safe since I presented my session on both days of AnsibleFest! Alas, due to some technical glitch, all the session recordings were lost, and so the only recordings available online today are those which were re-recorded by presenters.

As life happened... re-recording the session was put on the back burner. And after many months, I started to forget the structure of the presentation (I haven't given it since AnsibleFest), so I figured I might never get around to re-recording it at home.

Luckily, though, when I was running through Final Cut Pro to archive the previous years' completed projects, I found a practice recording of the session from the week before AnsibleFest. It was thankfully pretty good, and only needed a few slight edits:

It's that time of year again! Leading up to DrupalCon Seattle, Chris Urban and I are working on a presentation on Local Development environments for Drupal, and we have just opened up the 2019 Drupal Local Development Survey.

Local development environment usage results from 2018's survey.

If you do any Drupal development work, no matter how much or how little, we would love to hear from you. This survey is not attached to any Drupal organization, it is simply a community survey to help highlight some of the most widely-used tools that Drupalists use for their projects.

Take the 2019 Drupal Local Development Survey

This blog post contains a written transcript of my NEDCamp 2018 keynote, Real World DevOps, edited to match the style of this blog. Accompanying resources: presentation slides, video (coming soon).

I'm Jeff Geerling; you probably know that because my name appears in huge letters at the top of every page on this site, including the post you're reading right now. I currently work at Acquia as a Senior Technical Architect, building hosting infrastructure projects using some buzzword-worthy tech like Kubernetes, AWS, and Cloud.

I'm excited to announce I'll be presenting the session Make your Ansible Playbooks Flexible, Maintainable, and Stable at AnsibleFest Austin in the first week of October.

I've spent a lot of time building, maintaining, and in a few cases, completely restructuring Ansible playbooks over the past five years. I hope to distill a lot of the lessons I've learned into this presentation, and I hope anyone else who is as passionate about infrastructure automation as I am can get a lot out of it.

As usual, I'll post slides—and hopefully video as well—from the presentation after it's over. Hope to see you in Austin!

Over the past decade, I've enjoyed presenting sessions at many DrupalCamps, DrupalCon, and other tech conferences. The conferences are some of the highlights of my year (at least discounting all the family things I do!), and lately I've been appreciative of the local communities I meet and get to be a part of (even if for a very short time) at Drupal Camps.

The St. Louis Drupal Users Group has chosen to put off it's annual Camp to 2019, so we're guiding people to DrupalCorn Camp, which is only a little bit north of us, in Iowa.

MidCamp 2018 wrapped up with a bang today, as there was another year full of great training, sessions, and my favorite aspect, the 'hallway track' (where you go around and network between and during some sessions with tons of excellent Drupalists from the Midwest and around the country).

This year, I presented two sessions; one a co-presentation with Chris Urban titled Local Dev Environments for Dummies, the other a solo presentation titled Jenkins or: How I learned to stop worrying and love automation.

Embedded below are the video recordings of the sessions (recorded as always by the excellent Kevin Thull of Blue Drop Shop!):

The St. Louis Drupal Users Group (STLDUG) just finished it's fourth Drupal Camp, held at UMSL yesterday. I had a great time meeting with everyone, and am excited for next year! Last year I had to miss the Camp due to unexpected surgery, but this year I was able to attend and even bring some of my photo gear, to take pictures (I love contributing to open source through means other than code!); here's the obligatory 'whole camp' photo:

You can view all my photos from the camp in an album on Flickr: Drupal Camp St. Louis 2017 photos by geerlingguy

I presented Just Keep Swimming! Or, how not to drown in your open source project at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017, as part of the Being Human track. Below is a text summary of the presentation (along with the associated slides).

Here's a video of the presentation; scroll past it to read through a transcript and slides:

And the slides/transcript:

Update: The BoF has come and passed... and I put up a comprehensive summary of the session here: Composer and Drupal are still strange bedfellows.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, April 25), I'm leading a Birds of a Feather (BoF) at DrupalCon Baltimore titled Managing Drupal sites with Composer (3:45 - 4:45 p.m. in room 305).

I've built four Drupal 8 websites now, and for each site, I have battle scars from working with Composer (read my Tips for Managing Drupal 8 projects with Composer). Even some of the tools that I use alongside composer—for project scaffolding, managing dependencies, patching things, etc.—have changed quite a bit over the past year.