Learn About Dendrite (Opscode's Internal Tooling)

This month's talk comes to us from Chris Maier, a colleague of mine at Opscode. I've received the impression from the group that a lot of you are interested in the internal tooling companies use to make themselves more productive. Chris is going to give you a look at some of the secret and not so secret sauce that helps Opscode crank out new versions of Chef.

Here's how Chris describe's his talk:

As adherents to "DevOps" (whatever that means), we're familiar with the benefits of automating our systems. The applications we run are complex beasts, and trying to maintain them manually is a fool's errand. We all know this: it's pretty much gospel in our industry now. But how often to we think about automating ourselves?

The daily work of a developer is littered with tedious and complex tasks that distract from real work. Giving serious thought and consideration to developer automation tooling is a worthy pursuit, and can help streamline your individual lives, as well as boost productivity across your team. I'll be talking about "dendrite", the tool I wrote that we use internally at Opscode. I'll walk you through some of the things it allows us to do, as well as point out general ideas and principles that you can take back and apply at your own company.

Christopher Maier started out doing research in a virology lab at UNC. Gradually, he caught the programming bug and moved on to creating software for aggregating and analyzing data for custom bioinformatics applications. Now he works as a backend engineer for Opscode.

We're back at WebAssign this month. Directions and parking info are here (https://www.meetup.com/Triangle-DevOps/messages/boards/thread/25162432).

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone.

• Mark Mzyk

Update: I was asked to explain what Dendrite is, to give some more background to what this talk will cover. Dendrite is a command line tool that was originally developed by Chris to support Opscode's internal workflow. It started out focused mostly on streamlining our use of git repos and our interactions with github. With it we can mostly avoid going directly to github. It also has some other bells and whistles to help in our workflow and is steadily adding additional functionality over time. I'm sure Chris will be addressing all of this in his talk, as well as some new functionality that moves beyond just git and github.