Automate all things - boxen

[ItGumby]

partner with @jdigger

Outline (in progress)

• features
• getting started
• customizing
• private (dot files, tokens, …)
• recommendations: organization (ghUser, people, modules), hiera, etc
• troubleshooting
• upgrading
• uninstalling

[tlberglund]

@DOSUG/boardmembers Your thoughts? I would love two things:

• A talk on Boxen
• A talk on Boxen that was not by a GitHubber

So I'm pretty 👍 on this, but discussion is always open.

[jdigger]

As stated, this is still being developed, but in addition to what's there I'm thinking in terms of talking about the reasons for doing it (theory), and some basics of config management in Puppet. I'd like it to be more about configuring your workstation, with Boxen being a great concrete implementation of the practice.

[tlberglund]

@jdigger Sounds good to me. Despite being a Boxen user and occasional speaker, my Puppet is actually quite weak, so I'd benefit from moar Puppet stuff. I would be happy to bounce around some philosophy ideas with you, since I've heard from the original developers on what they were thinking on that point. (Knowing you, you may also have a line on that same info, but I'm just saying. 😀)

[tlberglund]

@ItGumby and @jdigger You guise ready for this in May?

[jdigger]

Sure, though the Meetup site shows Joe McTee speaking on Hadoop for May. Would June be better since it currently shows as being open?

[danhillenbrand]

@jdigger @ItGumby @tlberglund
Jim, the site is wrong(!) Joe McTee actually did his talk in March, according to the schedule (I missed the meeting but I assume he did his talk then), and I failed to clear the May meeting. So I'll take his information down for May, and I'll put up a placeholder for you in it's place.

When you have a complete abstract, I'll update the site again.

Best of luck with the preparation!

Thanks--Dan Hillenbrand

[jdigger]

Abstract:

“Infrastructure as code” is accepted for our servers, but why don’t we apply it to our desktops? Boxen is a tool that enables not just automated installation of software, but also configuration of our desktops. Boxen puts the developer in control of their desktop (as if they weren’t anyway) but also scales across companies, teams, and even home vs work computers.

We will cover the basic ideas and tools involved, as well showing some of the things you can configure (hint: everything) for really pimping your machine and making upgrading your environment much faster and consistent WAAAY beyond dotfiles. We’ll also talk about our experiences in scaling this across the developers in our team.

[tlberglund]

@jdigger I declare this to be 🏀er. Everybody else, you good?

Also, I vote we title it "Boxen: Config Beyond Dotfiles."

[jdigger]

I like the title suggestion. We should probably put something in either the title or abstract about it being really a tool for OS X since while theoretically it can also be used for other OSes, in reality...

[ItGumby]

I kind of want to lead people to want to migrate it to other platforms... a call to action, if possible

[tlberglund]

Boxen: OSX Config Beyond Dotfiles

[danhillenbrand]

@tlberglund @jdigger
I've update the site, but not certain who @ItGumby is. Is this Brian Street?

[ItGumby]

yes, @ItGumby is Brian Street

[danhillenbrand]

Thanks, @ItGumby!