That was, once more, the week that was

So LISA's over...has been for a week now. Time to put up some thoughts about what it was like.

First off, the blogging was a lot of work, and big enormous shouts out to BeerOps and Mark Lamourine, as well as Noah Meyerhans and Matt Simmons, for doing such excellent work. We kept a pretty good cadence going. Our goal was two posts/week in the leadup to the conference, which we pretty much met, and then one post/day per person during the conference itself, which we nailed. I'm glad I did it and I'm glad it's done and I'm glad I went. (Glad glad glad gladdity glad glad, in fact.)

I realized in retrospect that I did not mention anywhere that I got free admission to the conference for our work; that's bad. I love the conference and would have been happy to go anyhow, but I should have made it clear that I was being compensated for it. Not sure if that's necessarily required on the USENIX site itself, but I was also writing here...anyhow: I messed up there.

Speaking of posts, I also wrote a post for $WORK on testing Puppet modules with ServerSpec and Vagrant. (I wasn't paid for that, but it's expected that we'll take turns coming up with posts for the blog; this came out of a lunch-and-learn I did for coworkers on this topic.) That one was a lot of work, too, both for the writing and the example code that goes with it, and I'm glad it's finally done.

But back to LISA. Some highlights from the conference:

• chance to learn about statistics
• getting to meet fellow bloggers BeerOps and Mark Lamourine in person
• getting to meet Dave Josephsen
• presentation on Bosun
• Facebook data centre keynote
• Hosting a well-attended BoF on testing infrastructure code
• learning from Brendan Gregg that the state of process tracing on Linux is much better than I would have guessed
• meeting Kurt Opsahl, deputy general counsel for the EFF:

I gave the @EFF all my cash & all I got was this pic of @kurtopsahl with the #goldenpony (Oh, + internet freedom.)

— Saint Aardvark (@saintaardvark) November 12, 2014

• Getting to see Sarah and Noah again, and meet Logan (their brand-new 5-week old boy)
• Dinner with my family and Matt, where he totally got drunk and started singing "Brandy" even though we were at a pizza joint, not a karaoke bar
• A lovely visit to Seattle with my family: Space Needle, Woodland Zoo and breakfast at a brewery

There's more to write, but I need to post this...so I'll come back to the BoF and some questions I got asked about testing code in the first place.