Puppet

Atom.io was getting too bloated. So after much trial and error, and learning curve, I went hard into vim, and started using spacevim. In fact, I’m typing this up in spacevim right now with a live Markdown preview showing in a side browser window.

The biggest challenge besides getting it working and all the dependencies, was to get the terminal colors and unicode characters to display properly. At work, I settled on a Terminator terminal over X11+SSH session to get the colors just right, even though setting xterm-256color (or color256 maybe) as your terminal type and also installing the powerline fonts. The Deja Vu Mono from powerline works best I’ve found. Weirdly, it works better over an X11 session using a X Server on Windows (MobaXTerm) with vim running on a private cloud provisioned Ubuntu 16.04 server then it does on my Ubuntu workstation/laptop at home. The difference really is that just a few characters show up as random unicode blocks, even after changing the font on my home machine, not sure the difference (edit: I since fixed this by installing nerd fonts: https://github.com/SpaceVim/SpaceVim/issues/619 ).

2016 has been another crazy year for me, and 2017 is just as crazy. I’ve been putting off updating my site for a while (a whole year). So here is a summary update of just some of the things I’ve been working on for 2016 and the first few months of 2017.

Certifications: I am now a Puppet Certified Professional 2016, I guess if its not obvious, I’ve been working even more heavily with Puppet, going to training, writing modules, etc. This was my first certification and I will say the test is very difficult testing you on every obscure area of Puppet, and it changes a lot between versions. If you’re studying for this exam, you need to practically read all their documentation on top of training and having real life experience. Their are study guides, I also just recently obtained certification as an IBM Certified System Administrator for WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V8.5.5 and Liberty Profile. Mostly because I’ve been working with it heavily for a while so the certification was just a formality, I barely studied for that one.