Every job I’ve ever had has been customer facing, ranging from delivering pharmacy prescriptions at 10 (old ladies tip really well BTW, often provide cups of tea and large piles of biscuits) to my current role dealing with both internal and external customers. I think I’ve learnt some important lessons from the nearly 30 years of customer service.1 Have no shame about being in customer service Firstly, there’s no shame in saying you work in customer service.

So when I first started the Puppet Online Linter there were a few things it couldn’t do. I’ve knocked most of those features out in the last couple of months. The last remaining feature was how to allow private repos to be linted. After a bit of fiddling with the GitHub API and its OAuth2 authorization this is now working too. If you want to lint a private repo then go to this URL to authorize the Puppet Linter application.

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

In the past I’ve talked a lot about hiring and my approach to it. I rarely talk about or see any posts about hiring’s corollary: firing.1 It’s an area I’ve messed up more than once and I’ve learnt some very painful lessons from these experiences. Because, just as it’s critical to hire right, it is also critical to fire right.2 Obviously you hopefully never want to be in the position to fire someone but sadly it’s something that every manager needs to know how to do.

First, a warning. The tool described in this post serves little to no useful purpose other than to entertain me for 10 minutes… So I was musing yesterday about how finger used to work and wondering if there were any active finger accounts left on the Internet.1 So I thought to myself “what replaces finger”? The first thing that sprung to mind were Twitter bios. So I decided to write twinger which provide finger-like output of a Twitter user, for example: