Articles by: Allister Banks

Couch to 50k (CPE’s)

Couch to 50k (CPE’s)

I’m going to ping pong between a few topics here, so to give everyone guideposts, here are the three main topics I’d like to stay with you, dear reader: 1. With 50k people in the MacAdmins Slack, it’s fine if you don’t want to be a Client Platform Engineer, but […]

Read more

Zentral for ~Observability~ ~Governance~ Compliance

Zentral for ~Observability~ ~Governance~ Compliance

You’ve watched my MDOYVR presentation, but instead of being able to draw an owl, you’re concerned about standing up an osquery query distribution stack in production (unfortunately not what we’ll cover in this post, sorry!) and actually doing the job of visualizing the data. ‘Observability’ and ‘governance’ are my favorite […]

Read more

Code Wranglers Speak In Tongues (Generally)

It is commonly said that python tends to be at least the second-best tool to reach for when approaching a task, whereas some of us get by just fine with shell. The lack of a compilation step for scripting languages tends to help us iterate and ship good-enough solutions quickly, […]

Read more

What we talk about when we talk about code wranglin’

Part Two, Git Recommendations Revisited. (Part One is Here) Since we’re talking code, we should come to grips with the ungainly topic of version control itself before going much further, which in 2020 still means git. On this site (~6 years ago! with not the most generous title) we went […]

Read more

Code Wranglin’, A Series

Welcome to a series about wranglin’ cats code. Some of us are inclined to care about titles, and while I’m fine being a MacAdmin, Client Platform ‘Engineer‘ is a more recent term recruiters want to plug into LinkedIn. That engineer part is meant to differentiate us from the apes sysadmins, […]

Read more

Name Goes Here, code bass=”clash”

On the Twitters not too long ago the question was posed: what topic could you give a 20 minute talk about without any prep? macOS Computer Naming is a thing I can’t find a great canonical resource for on the internets, so here’s an attempt to fill that gap, since […]

Read more

Stuck in the past? Your time may get warped, too

Stuck in the past? Your time may get warped, too

If the recent kerfluffle among autopkg folks (over GitHub shutting off TLS less-than 1.2) is any indication, a lot of people are still on 10.12.6. If I may editorialize for a second, this is probably contributed to by Apple’s less-than-ideal planning, execution, and communication around the High Sierra release. What […]

Read more

UEFI, 10.13/APFS, and You(r Imaging)

UEFI, 10.13/APFS, and You(r Imaging)

Let’s discuss the basic input/output system for IBM PC compatible computing devices, aka BIOS. Wait, that’s not a good start, P.eople C.an’t reM.ember C.omputer and I.nternet A.cronyms. Ok, EFI – that’s a thing that’s like BIOS, right? You can lock it, it makes sure all your most vital hardware components […]

Read more

Hook The Lintings

Friends don’t let friends commit puppet code with obvious errors. Especially when you’re working with a team, having a consistent style enforced by something like puppet-lint means less messy diffs as you send changes to each other to review. And if you’re leveraging stuff like r10k, you definitely don’t want […]

Read more

Hipster Software Management

Hipster Software Management

Socially, Slack and Twitter are the two poles I gravitate between: Slack for when I’m hoping to be a burden on or distracted by our always-up-to-something community, and Twitter when I’m more in the mood to consume the echo chamber than reverberate sound out in to it. And then there’s […]

Read more