CatButtes Blog

Value of an Incident Postmortem

Value of an Incident Postmortem

One of the things I have come to believe in since working in a full stack type of role is the value of a postmortem. When something goes wrong, it is too easy to just fix it and move on to the next thing.

The Joy of Automating Deployments (again)

The Joy of Automating Deployments (again)

Previously on the topic of automating deployments I mentioned that we would “likely to be able to perform more regular releases” now we had a streamlined process. Well, it seems that we are indeed performing more regular deployments! Since I made the last post on this topic, we have performed

A Year of Involuntary Home Working

A Year of Involuntary Home Working

Today marks a year to the day since the University I work for told the IT department to pack up and go home. Other staff had been sent home a few days earlier, but we had been kept on site while it was established things were working well.

The Joy of Automating Deployments

The Joy of Automating Deployments

The team I am on at work has recently been on an automation spree. This has stemmed from a disasterous deployment a year ago where things we had tested were broken, things that hadn’t been tested had been deployed and we ultimately ended up rolling the deployment back.

Getting Vagrant and Ansible working on Windows 10

Getting Vagrant and Ansible working on Windows 10

One of the big things I have started using both at work and at home is Ansible. It is an automated deployment tool that makes it really easy to create reproducable builds. This means I have needed to figure out a way to test the playbooks I am using to deploy and upgrade servers. Enter Vagrant.

Working from home during a pandemic

Working from home during a pandemic

This year has been wild. Early on in the pandemic there were mutterings going around at work about sending us all home to work from there. Nobody was really expecting it to actually happen for a while - and then it did.