(thanks to Hyperbole & A Half & http://memegenerator.net/X-All-The-Things)

The image above got me thinking a lot about DevOps and automation. Increasingly, as large scale IaaS clouds are deployed, the first hurdle people hit is around automation. When they arrive at this problem, and my guess it’s pretty early in the cycle, they inevitably turn to an automation tool such as Puppet or Chef. These tools allow for automating pretty much anything you want around deployment, configuration, and management. When dealing with hundreds, thousands, and certainly hundreds of thousands of hosts, automation becomes critical. In a lot of ways, scale and automation go hand in hand. The relationship, while symbiotic in nature, works well. Scale begets automation, and more automation increases your scaling.

On top of being a software engineer, I’m also the father of 3 kids. My daughter recently turned 8, and she is my oldest. I’ve been having her try out different methods of learning to program already, but nothing had really stuck. But I think this is about to change, as I recently discovered the wonderful website KidsRuby. After spending some time with KidsRuby over the last few days, it’s become clear there is interest enough to keep my daughter entertained and learning. My main gauge has been the fact my middle son (6) has also shown interest in what his sister is doing! Both of them have spent time playing with KidsRuby over the last few days, read on for our experience.