The Config Management Camp 2015 is gone leaving its trail of inspiring presentations, interesting discussions, pleasant meetings with great people and, hopefully, satisfaction for how each of us has played his/her part to make this edition a success.

A big thank for the brave people that attended my seminar and to those who asked questions. The questions gave me a couple of ideas to further expand the seminar, and more may come if you’re so kind to let me know your opinion on the talk: what you liked, what you didn’t, what could be improved in both the talk and the speaker’s style. Thanks in advance. As for the code of the tools, I promise to publish it on GitHub as soon as I get “clearance” (this week, possibly!).

For those who weren’t at the seminar, I presented how we evolved our git repository structure to support more than one project, each one with its own needs, but at the same time being able to share the relevant common libraries and tools and to make the deployment of the policies easy, manageable and maintainable, whatever the number of hubs and projects involved. The questions dove nose down to how we manage access to the hubs so that a person working on project A can’t accidentally deploy his policies on the hubs supporting project B, how we manage access rights to files in separate projects and to branches, and how easy or hard is to extend the deployment tool with new functionality.

The slides of the presentation are on SpeakerDeck (or further down the post if you don’t bother go to SpeakerDeck 😉 The good guys at Normation also filmed the seminar, so it’s just a matter of time that a video of the seminar will be available. Then you’ll also be able to hear my appeal to support cancer research, talking of which you can check another blog post of mine.

Regarding the talks I attended and the “hallway track”, Jez Humble’s keynote was definitely a mind blowing experience. Leaving aside the things that I am doing wrong, that we are doing wrong in my work environment, and that a broad set of people in our profession is f***ing up completely, I understood that there is a category that definitely needs to be more present at events like this: bosses. Because we can do a good job as professionals, follow the best practices, use the brightest and shiniest tools of today and some of the tools of tomorrow, but that’s definitely not enough to establish a culture of cross-area collaboration. That’s not going to happen without the direct involvement of the bosses and their mandate.