Nate Sickler

Some time ago, I gave an ignite talk here at our SEP Dev Ops guild meeting discussing SaltStack.  It’s a wondrous configuration management tool with a load of features.  The slides are available at the bottom of this post, but first… Context Much of what the slides contain is more about the capabilities of SaltStack […]

SEP Book Classics – What’s that? Well, good question. SEP Book Classics started from a discussion in an Appreticeship Patterns book club at SEP. Our group was discussing how to help new members to the company gain a shared language/knowledge of many of the books that we’ve read at SEP. The problem then, was to […]

As part of some recent project work, our team encountered the need to install an application remotely to a set of internationally spread developers using an Ubuntu environment. So to help spread some knowledge and serve as a resource for furture developers who may be sharing a similar problem – here’s how we learned to […]

Agile Estimating and Planning, a book written by Mike Cohn (who writes an excellent blog you should all follow), is the de facto “classic” book for learning about Agile Planning. With great examples, illustrations for learning, and just the right amount of detail, Agile Estimating and Planning is a book I’ll be coming back to […]

Having recently begun acting as Scrum Master for an 8 developer off-site team with with several hundred active project members, I thought it a wise idea to more formally read up on the traits and aspects that make a Scrum Master great (or even good for that matter). Before I get into my personal reflection […]

We all make plans everyday. Small plans, big plans, short term plans and long term plans. We plan for retirement; we plan for the weekend and we plan for our next meal. We make plans for everything and hope nothing changes. But inevitably our best laid schemes gang aft agley. Gang’ing Aft Agley So what […]

A Dirty Phrase “More Complicated Than It Has To Be” is about as dirty a thing I can imagine saying to another developer in relation to their code or solution to a given problem. Sometimes that’s a result of ignorance of a simple helper method which does the thing they’ve coded, or maybe they’ve decided […]

It’s Blog Battlin’ time here at SEP again, and though the rules have changed the sentiment is the same – Get out there and write. So, here goes nothing. If you haven’t guessed from the title my topic is ‘Been There, Done That’. Experience It’s fairly obvious the intention behind the phrase, but how does […]

Bad Ideas We all have them It’s true, as much as we hate to admit it. I’ve had my fair share, and I’m bound to have even more. That doesn’t mean I’m going to share these ideas with the world or run off and implement things now, but it does mean that I have an […]