A few years back, I got LASIK eye surgery to correct my vision, and ended up with 20/16 vision a couple weeks after. Over the past couple years, my vision has finally gotten to the point where things are just blurry enough to necessitate glasses for some kinds of activity, so I've been considering getting LASIK again (the optometrist I used has a significant discount for repeat procedures, so it's an easier decision this time around!).

One of the major hurdles to

Ansible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Ansible for Devops is a book I wrote to teach you to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.

I've spent a lot of time working with Ansible and Drupal over the past couple years, culminating in projects like Drupal VM (a VM for local Drupal development) and the Raspberry Pi Dramble (a cluster of Raspberry Pi computers running Drupal 8, powering https://www.pidramble.com

Ansible for DevOps , my first book, is finally available for sale on Amazon and iTunes (in addition to LeanPub, where it's been available as an in-progress work since last February!).

I've written quite a bit about the my writing process, book sales pre-publication, and motivation in previous blog posts, linked here:

• $25K in book sales, and I'm almost ready to publish
• Writing on LeanPub - $0.21 per word
• Self-publishing

After almost two years of writing, editing, and rewriting my book, I've finally completed the first edition of Ansible for DevOps , and it's available for sale on Amazon, LeanPub, and iTunes!

The book is 400 pages long, just shy of 80,000 words, and was a huge effort. It's such a relief to finally have it 'out the door', though publishing-as-I-write has been a great experience. Pre-

The 'Souls and Goals' soccer match is now in its third year! The Kenrick-Glennon Seminary Lions will battle against the Clergy and Company team (comprised of a bunch of priests and a few friends, like me!).

The game will be held at St. Dominic High School on Thursday, November 5 , with a kickoff at 7 p.m . The game is free to anyone, and concessions will be available. More info is available on the Souls and Goals website (with a fresh new

I started writing my first book almost two years ago. At the beginning of the project, I set an ambitious goal: Write a 90-page introductory-level technical book on some relatively new software, and sell 200 copies.

As a developer and dabbling entrepreneur, I calculated that if I sold the book for around $10-20, and wrote the book based on real-world scenarios I'd already encountered (meaning very little extra research/discovery required), I could

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Ansible for DevOps , a book on Ansible by Jeff Geerling.

Introduced in Ansible 2.0.0 (still in active development, currently in alpha), Blocks allow you to group related tasks together and apply particular task parameters on the block level. They also allow you to handle errors inside the blocks in a way similar to most programming languages' exception handling.

Here's an example playbook that uses blocks with when to run group of tasks specific to one platform