Category Archives: Blog post

Chef 101: Getting Started With Automation

Take a look at some practices that can help you get a running start with your Chef automation and the principle of Policy as Code. This post is designed to be beginner-friendly. You don’t need any coding experience to follow along — just an interest in automation, and curiosity about how best to implement it… Read More »

The coding SysAdmin

For anyone working in a traditional sysadmin role, automation — and a larger DevOps conversation — can be disconcerting. Modern automation means “code” and some sysadmins insist coding is outside their job descriptions. In fact, when I was an IT director, I had a sysadmin tell me, “We don’t code.” He was content with maintaining… Read More »

How my cat helped me build a better IoT app

My cat Tucker is a somewhat predictable animal who likes to curl up in predictable spots around the house, so he’s the perfect subject for surreptitious video surveillance and just the sort of motivating force I needed to rework a Raspberry Pi project I’d been putting off for some time. [Read more]

Cellular + IoT isn’t as hard as you think

I’ve always been a bit hesitant to add cellular networking to my IoT projects because I figured the cost of bandwidth and the hardware requirements were more trouble than they were worth. But after some experimentation, I got over my fears and found cellular wasn’t nearly as expensive or as complicated as I thought. [Read… Read More »

The joy of bash on Windows

One of the things I like best about running a Linux desktop is the bash shell, which is great for connecting to other boxes, editing files, running Docker containers — you name it. So, when Microsoft introduced the bash shell for Windows 10, I was skeptical. After all, I’ve used cmd.exe for years and it’s… Read More »