Save time writing release notes!

What’s the worst that could happen?

But we are hackers and hackers have black terminals with green font colors ~ John Nunemaker

This is the second in a series of posts on useful bash aliases and shell customisations that developers here at Talis use for their own personal productivity. In this post I describe how I configured my shell to automatically change my terminal theme when I connect to a remote machine in any of our AWS accounts.

It turns out that Docker has an internal Domain Name Service (DNS). Did you know? It’s new to me too! I learnt the hard way while using a VPN.

At its core ChatOps means building tools that make it easier to operate your infrastructure via a Bot than via the Terminal … by placing tools directly in the middle of the conversation everyone is pairing all the time ~ Jesse Newland

ChatOps is all about conversation-driven development. The idea, put simply, is that team members interacting with each other in a chat room can issue commands that a bot listens to and is configured to execute. These commands can range from deploying code to retrieving logs to provisioning new services. ChatOps, in a very real sense, helps to integrate people, bots and tools together in an automated and transparent way.

When working with Puppet, you’ll eventually arrive at a problem: How do you develop, deploy and test changes to your Puppet configuration without pushing those changes to production until you know they are ready.

At last week’s Talis Hackday I worked on “powering up” Lord Zeus, our Hubot plug-in to Hipchat. Hubot can be great fun and amazingly useful. We added scripts that were both.