2026-02-02, 14:00–14:25, B.1.015
I'm sure I don't have to describe the chaos inflicted on the Puppet community when Perforce decided to sequester the source away. Open Source Puppet is no more and many of us have been suddenly thrust into the roles of managing a large group maintaining a large, mature, and very hairy bit of software.
Let's take a no-holds-barred stroll through the story of this last year. I'll share some of the things that worked really well, and a whole lot of things that haven't. We'll talk about some tech challenges that were smaller hills to climb than we thought, and some that turned out to be real bears. I'll talk a bit about the biggest challenge we've faced. (Hint, it's people, time, and communication. It's always people, time and communication.)
Community lead, developer advocate, and founder; I get to build neat things -and- talk to people! \o/ I've been in the tech industry in one way or another since the late 90's doing everything from devops before devops was a thing at a tiny security startup, to forensics investigations, to maintaining a compute cluster for a computational anthropology department at an American university and teaching the grad students how to write distributed Java code to run on it.
I run marathons in those funny finger shoes and my social engagement is primarily at https://hachyderm.io/@binford2k. You may have heard of that thing I'm building -- https://overlookinfratech.com.