The Drupal community uses IRC extensively for collaboration and community building. A permanent and ever-helpful fixture of the official #drupal-* IRC channels, and in the Drupal community itself, is the humble Druplicon bot. Druplicon is a Drupal-based IRC bot that was created in 2005, and is still going strong as part of the Bot module for Drupal.

Bots like Druplicon do a lot of nice things—they can remind people of things after they were away for a while, they

Erik Dietrich's blog, Daedtech , contains a lot of great posts concerning programming and workplace dynamics. In today's post, Meetings and Introverts: Strangers in Strange Lands Erik writes about the vexing relationship between introverted people and typical meetings. In a prior post , he wrote about the general problem of social situations and introverts:

Social situations are exhausting for me because of their inherent unpredictability as compared to something like the feedback loop of a program that I’m writing (or even the easily curated,

I've been using Vagrant for almost all development projects for the past two years, and for projects where I'm the only developer, Vagrant + VirtualBox has worked great, since I'm on a Mac. I usually use NFS shared folders so I can keep project data (Git/SVN repositories, assets, etc.) on my local computer, and share them to a folder on the VM, and not suffer the performance penalty of using VirtualBox's native shared folders.

However, this solution

St. Louis is getting ready for its first-ever DrupalCamp! On April 26, 2014, DrupalCamp St. Louis will open up with a keynote by Brad Nowak, a Business Development Manager at Palantir. The Camp will have sessions covering a variety of topics, like Drupal 8 and how your business can benefit from Drupal's flexibility. It will be held at Washington University's West Campus in Clayton, MO, just a few blocks from a MetroLink station and only a few minutes away

2020 Update : This article is still as relevant as ever, though Galaxy now has tens of thousands of roles and also has 'Collections' now, which can include plugins, modules, and roles! If you want to learn the latest about all this stuff, check out my fully updated Ansible for DevOps , now in it's 2nd edition! It has two chapters covering roles and collections on Ansible Galaxy.

Ansible Galaxy was launched just a few short months ago, and already has over 5

I use Tower from time to time to do some git operations that require a little more attention or a better visual overview than what I can get via the CLI and built-in tools. However, I noticed that Tower likes to take over any folder with .git, and make Mac OS X's finder turn it into a 'Tower' package, so double-clicking the folder (which now behaves like a mini app or file) opens Tower.

I don't like that behavior, because I

Less than two years ago, my family said farewell to Grandpa Geerling . Just a few days ago, my Grandfather on my mother's side passed away.

He was a humble man. Grandpa won't be mentioned in history books. He didn't do anything incredible in the world's eyes, but he was a great family man and role model.

Grandpa helped my Grandma (who is a saintly woman in her own right, and still with us, thanks be to God!) raise six

I've published the first portion of a book I've been writing, Ansible for DevOps . This is my first-ever book, and I've written a little about the process of writing on Server Check.in's blog: Self-publishing my first technical book on LeanPub .

I'm excited about the early feedback I've already received—and I haven't even finished writing half the book! I'm hoping to finish the first complete draft of the book

Update : Almost two years later , I've finally finished the book! You can purchase Ansible for DevOps on LeanPub , Amazon , or iTunes .

For the past year, I've seen many accounts of first-time authors finally taking the plunge and self-publishing a book on some technology or another, and finally decided to do the same.

Like many of these first-time authors, I felt I was prepared for the project, for the following reasons:

• I had (what I thought was)