Puppet Camp - Ghent 2013

It’s been a while since I’ve attended a Puppet Camp but considering the quality of the last one (organised by Patrick Debois) and the fact it was being held in the lovely city of Ghent again I thought it’d be a wise investment to scrape together the time off.

The quality of the talks seemed quite high and considering the number of newer users present the content level was well pitched. A couple of deeper talks for the more experienced members would have been nice but we mostly made our own in the open sessions. Facter, writing MCollective plugins, off-line and bulk catalogue compilation and the murky corners of our production puppets all came under discussion - in some cases quite fruitfully.

The wireless was a point of annoyance and amusement (depending on the person and the time of day). We had 20 users for an audience of ten times that - the attitudes covered the gamut from “I only need to check my mail once a day” to “I have my own tethering” and all the way to “This is my brute force script I run in a loop”. You can tell when most of us lost our access based on the twitter hash tag.

I was a little surprised at the number of Puppet Camps there will be this year - 27 was the number mentioned. I think a lot of the more experienced members of the community value the camps and confs as a chance to catch up with each other and the PuppetLabs people and I’d hate to see us sticking to our own local camps and losing the cross pollination of ideas, plans and pains.

You can also view the Puppet Camp slides for a number of the sessions.