Robert Nowadly

Recent Articles

A Review of Three Checksum Verifier Tools

What is a CheckSum? A checksum is a unique string that identifies a file. You can think of it as a file’s fingerprint. Why do I need a Checksum Verifier? I have been writing scripts that automatically download programs and install them on computers. It is not secure to just download the file and blindly […]

Installing FoodCritic on Windows

FoodCritiic is a linter for Chef Cookbooks. It does an automated code review on your Chef Cookbook and reports violations. See the FoodCritiic home page for a list of violations and how to fix them. Here are steps I used to install it on Windows. Install Ruby Install Ruby DevKit. I put in C:\Ruby-DevKit cd […]

Creating a Chef Cookbook for Windows

The Berkshelf documentation moved to the “official” Chef docs. I found it a little confusing but complete. The purpose of this post is to remind future self how to do this, without having to dig through the docs again. These instruction assume the following is installed ChefDK Version 1.1.16 Vagrant Vagrant winrm plugin VirtualBox I create […]

Ignite DevOps 2017 @ SEP – Chef

Last week I blogged about the Ignite Talks that happened at SEP last month. See below for the slides from the Chef Ignite Talk. Ignite Talk on Chef from Bob Nowadly Build awesome things for fun. Check out our current openings for your chance to make awesome things with creative, curious people. Explore SEP Careers […]

SEP Ignite DevOps 2017

Last month at SEP, our DevOp guild hosted an internal meeting of Ignite Talks. The theme for the talks was Configuration Management. Below is a slide deck I used to kick off the meeting. Over the next several weeks we will post more slides for the talks on Chef, Salt-Stack, Puppet, Docker, Packer and Mac Automation. […]

Elastic Search, LogStash, Kibana and Beats

I attended the Indy DevOps meetup last week to learn about Elastic Search, LogStash, and Kibana. Also known as the ELK stack. The speaker, Adis Cesar a Solution Architect at Elastic, also talked about something called Beats. What is Elastic Search? Elastic Search is a distributed computing platform for rapidly searching text. The inventor of Elastic Search built […]

What is DevOps?

What is DevOps? The word DevOps is a clipped version of the words Development and Operations [1]. What does development mean? Development is the process of designing, building and testing software. This includes product design user experience, software architecture, software design and coding. What does operations mean? The term operations describes the process of building […]
SEP Book Review of Predicting the Unpredictable

Book Review: Predicting the Unpredictable – Pragmatic approaches to estimating project schedule or cost by Johanna Rothman

Synopsis On every software project I’ve worked on, I’ve been asked two questions: “How much does it cost?” and “When will it be done?” Given enough experience on software projects, one would think this question would be easy to answer. The author explains why she thinks this is so hard. One reason she mentions is […]

Lessons learned from Moving from ASP.NET Webforms to ASP.NET MVC.

A few months ago a client came to us and asked for our help with rewriting a couple of their high volume pages in ASP.NET MVC. The current application was written using ASP.NET webforms in the .NET 4.5 framework. We did something similar a few years back so we thought this task would be a walk […]