The first half of February is going to be quite busy to me with two conferences just a few weeks away now.

On February 2nd and 3rd I’ll be at the Configuration Management Camp in Ghent, Belgium, where I’ll hold the seminar “Many projects, one code” on the 3rd. A little more than a week later, the 12th of February, I’ll then be at Software 2015 in Oslo, where I’ll hold the seminar “The classification problem: challenges and solutions” in the Continuous delivery and DevOps track. And yes, the slides will be available on my SpeakerDeck account as soon as a seminar is done.

The seminar at S2015 is basically the updated edition of the talks I held at FOSDEM and CMC last year. The updates include some improvements we have introduced in our ENC engine during 2014 and a sprinkle of errata.

I look forward at Software 2015 as a first opportunity to get in touch not only DevOps practitioners but also Norwegian companies from the Oslo area and beyond that apply the DevOps principles and culture every day.

The seminar at CMC will pick up from my posts about how we structured our git repository for CFEngine policies and how we designed our deployment process. If all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, the code related to the presentation will land on github by the end of next week. We’ll discuss possible repository structures and approaches and why having a sound deployment procedure is as important as getting your repository right.

CMC will be an opportunity to meet at least some of the wonderful people I got to know last year, discuss old and new ideas and developments and, of course, a huge learning opportunity. In fact, my attempt to set a personal schedule for me is not as straightforward as last year. By the looks of it, I’ll have to jump in and out from the Rudder & CFEngine community room to be able to attend all the presentations I am interested in.

My current plan is available here, if you’re curious. You may notice that I intend to attend the tutorial “SaltStack for DevOps and Configuration Management“. While I am not going to replace CFEngine with Salt, I believe that these two tools can be effectively combined together. My idea is to use CFEngine to describe and continously ensure a certain state or configuration to the sytems in the infrastructure and to the infrastructure as a whole, while Salt could be used for orchestration, that would be hard to achieve with CFEngine alone. I look forward to that tutorial, even if it means that I’ll have to miss the Rudder & CFEngine room for the whole day, <sniff>.

I am not going to FOSDEM this year. There is indeed a number of talks and tracks that I’d love so much to attend. To name a few: the configuration management devroom (of course!), the time track (which became even more interesting with the announcement of the next leap second at the end of June this year) and Larry Wall’s speech. “Unfortunately”, FOSDEM is as interesting as it is also popular and the venue, which is not a small one by the way (an entire University Campus in Brussels), can’t fully help with hosting the thousands of Free Software enthusiast coming there from all over Europe. If one’s interested in attending a popular track, the risk of not being able to get into the room is big. Sure there is a plan B, that is: the video streaming. But then, what’s the point of travelling to Brussels if you’re doomed to be out of the rooms?

So interesting and busy times ahead for a bit more. Hopefully my schedule will clear up a bit after that giving me the opportunity to breath a bit and to make room for some other interesting activities!