So, I spent a few weeks away from Seattle..

First stop was Chicago, we needed to do an integration and roll out a steaming pile of new puppet code to automate the everything. Now, we can auto-magically spin up new database clusters with no human intervention. ( by auto-magic I mean I spent a couple of nights not sleeping and just focusing on the problems involved in making all of this stuff happen, then wrote all the code ) .. I have spent a great deal of my adult life in Chicago.. So, despite what the news has to say its always nice to go back and see that everything is still right where I left it, plus loads of new condo's.. I got back to Hot Dougs for one last lunch before he goes on perm vacation. It gave me a chance to actually talk to him. I asked him why he was giving up the restaurant. Apparently that was "a personal decision", so I stopped with that track since I know that I would not get any more answer than that. But, I do have to say while Doug has always been pretty happy to be running the front counter. He seemed different on this visit, like he was about as happy as he had ever been and was loving what he was doing. Good for him.. In the meantime knowing that he will always be a chef first, I had a special gift for him.. A friend started making garlic wine on a dare.. The stuff is amazing, there is that step in bacon carbonara where you deglaze the pan with white wine.. I used garlic wine and the result is amazing.. SO, I figured I needed to pass the knowledge of this stuff on to one of the best chefs I know..

Next I spent a week in SFO at puppetconf 2014. Its a fairly big deal among the devops puppet folks. all I can say is wow.. It was pretty amazing to spend a couple of days surrounded by folks who's only purpose in life is to build something.. It was amazing to see people talking about the software and thinking about it, in person.. It was invigorating to be surrounded by folks who were really only interested in the thinking as it leads to doing.. One of the side effects is that the windows guy on my team is pretty close to having an offer from puppet labs. That is about as good as good gets in our world. So, he seemed a bit worried about our reactions when he let us know. I think he is still surprised that our response was to congratulate him. I think he was surprised to see that none of us view his gain as a loss for ourselves.. First, none of us are windows guys.,. Second, he has earned the hell out of an offer from puppet labs..

I think over the last couple weeks I have learned that taking the objectivist approach to things mostly just helps to make things even better..