Gavin Didrichsen
Gavin Didrichsen is a seasoned automation expert and advocate for simplifying complex processes through Puppet’s suite of tools. With over a decade of experience in infrastructure automation, Gavin has been a passionate Puppet user since 2014. His introduction to Puppet came while automating a cumbersome test environment setup for BT set-top boxes, transforming a manual week-long process into a streamlined, shareable workflow that completed in minutes.
Currently a Principal Software Engineer at Puppet by Perforce, Gavin focuses on leveraging tools like PDK and Bolt to drive best practices, solve complex customer challenges, and document domain knowledge through automation. He enjoys helping others embrace automation to solve real-world problems.
Gavin’s passion for simplifying workflows extends beyond his professional role. Outside of work, Gavin is deeply curious about technology and enjoys exploring how it can make life easier and help us be more "human".

Sessions
It is very common now for developers to code and test their applications on VMs, either locally hosted or on the cloud. As individuals have editor preferences (nvim, vscode, etc), so they have hypervisor. Once you create a bolt inventory file listing the server or servers, then bolt can easily configure those servers using custom puppet code. Instead of manually creating the bolt inventory, it is easy to create a dynamic inventory plugin--if it doesn't already exist--to suit your particular use case. This talk illustrates how we setup our own local dynamic inventory plugins to help with our automated development and testing.