One of the most important roles in the writing of a technical book is the technical reviewer. It’s also a really hard role because of the balance you need to strike. The first book I wrote, many years ago, was a Linux security title, aptly named Hardening Linux.1 The publisher found a technical reviewer for the book, another author, and sent them the first chapter. Which incidentally was the first chapter I’d ever written.

I get a lot of email from recruiters. Some awful, some insulting and some merely terrible. Rarely do I get solicitations that I go “Wow! I am keen to pursue this”. So what do they do wrong? Impersonal or personally wrong The most likely thing to make me press the delete key is if they are on the edge of spam. This usually means that the email is not personally addressed to me.

For the last three and a half years I’ve been helping build the business at Puppet Labs in Portland. I’ve had a lot of fun doing it, indeed we moved halfway across the world to take on the challenge. It’s been an enormous success. Puppet Labs has grown from the ten odd people in the company when I joined to over a hundred and sixty people and the business has boomed along with that growth.

One of the neat features of New Relic is the ability to report when deployment events take place so you can watch and model their impact on your applications. New Relic has a Deployment API that processes incoming events. Since a lot of you deploy your applications with Puppet and like me many of you also use New Relic, I decided to add some simple integration from Puppet to New Relic for reporting on deployments.

I’ve just released a Puppet report processor for sending metrics to Sematext. The report processor sends each of the metrics generated by a Puppet run to Sematext. You can find the code on GitHub and a module on the Forge. There are some simple installation instructions: Install the sematext-metrics gem on your Puppet master $ sudo gem install sematext-metrics Install puppet-sematext as a module in your Puppet master’s module path.