Admin Admin Podcast 100 Show notes

We reached the century! This episode was recorded via a live stream, so you get to hear a lot more of what happens behind the scenes than usual.

Jon is back in full after a short hiatus (due to being busy at his job). Jon has been visiting his clients at his role, rather than over conference calls.

Stuart has been at his current role for a while now, and is getting into Reliability being a primary focus rather than an afterthought.

Jerry is working with a client who runs Rancher (a Kubernetes distribution) on-premises using VMWare’s VSphere. He mentions about working across timezones with colleagues, which Al and Stuart also have experience with.

Jerry also mentions that his freelance work is increasing, meaning he may have to look at bringing other people in to help. He mentions the challenges of building his code/infrastructure to be utilised/managed by other people.

Jerry and Jon talk about using Github Actions to deploy code/changes.

Al brings up using Continuous Integration with Terraform (referencing Ned In The Cloud). He then asks the question about Git and branching strategies.

Jerry and Stuart talk about trunk-based development, and some of the downsides long-lived branches. Stuart talks about tagged commits, which can be a good way of managing how and where code runs.

Jerry mentions about some of the challenges of working with long-lived branches and divergence from the primary/default Git branch.

Stuart brings up the point that sometimes long-lived branches are useful, but more for deprecated versions/features (e.g. supporting older versions of Terraform).

Jon mentions a useful Github Action for working with Terraform.

Al brings up linting, which Jon gives a brief explanation of. Everyone talks briefly about pre-commit as well. Listener Yannick also mentions that Anthony Sottile (who has written a lot of pre-commit hooks) is doing Twitch streams on Python code, which are worth looking at.

We all talk about the podcast from the early days, meeting at different editions of OggCamp, and how the conference landscape has changed in recent years.

A big thank you to Dave Lee for supporting us in the Podcast, editing, and keeping us honest! Another big thank you to the Otherside Network for supporting us too.

A massive thank you to all of our listeners too!