My buddy at work, the lead developer came into my office one day and said that I am a developer, because I had more code checked in to the puppet repository (git) than most of the developers had checked into the product’s repository.

So now there’s a little yellow piece of sticky note on my name badge outside my door that says “Puppet Developer”, taped over where it says “Systems Administrator”.

At WWDC this year there were a few of us sysadmins who seemed to have all come to the same conclusion at around the same time, namely that sysadmins need to learn more from software development.

I’ve been trying to apply the same mindset to large scale client management lately with a framework to run unit tests on candidate client images. Why don’t sysadmins use unit tests more? Why don’t we do peer review more?

For me I think it was moving to Google that led to this epiphany, as this is literally the first company I’ve ever worked for whose primary business is software development, so we already have all these tools in place that are awesome for sysadmins, like Mondrian.

An interesting point a friend made was that the benefits of peer review on all your scripts are indisputable, but if you simply don’t work somewhere where you have a group of peers who can review all your work (and I’ve been there), then the best thing you can do is get approval to blog about it and publish scripts externally.

People like correcting mistakes in blog posts and suggesting improvements. If you put your work out in public, it’s not quite the same as immediate local peer review, but you can collect many of the same benefits, and that’s just from a purely selfish point of view, let alone the more altruistic aspects.