OpenNMS and Documentation

To help the OpenNMS project I spent a year together with Alexander Finger and Klaus Thielking-Riechert writing an OpenNMS book. We started with a development version of for 1.8 and tried to find a mixture between consistent slow changing and new concepts in 1.8. It was kind a complicated thing and from my point of view not perfectly done. Nevertheless I’ve thought about something like: “It’s about time writing a second edition covering the topics in coming 1.14?” The problem I’ve with books, it doesn’t allow contribution and hasn’t a really long life cycle. So I’ve decided instead of spending a year again writing a book, I want something which is more helpful to the project itself.

DevOps Guy

I started in 1998 in IT-Services and I did all the funny stuff – was involved building new networks for companies, migrated software from commercial vendors from version A to B to C to D and I have wasted too much lifetime on broken RAID 5s, backups and restores.

If you want to learn how to operate a computer network – this is a good place. You will always be called for the complicated problems nobody can solve with a simple Google search. You get also a good feeling, which solution is maintainable over a longer period of time. Fortunately people developing software experienced enough pain and started thinking about how to make code maintainable. Good developers realized years ago, people spend more time maintaining software than writing it. In my point of view an underestimated acceptance criteria in an “Agile” process ;) Since I spend more and more time in the OpenNMS project, I get much better an idea what the meaning about testing, documenting, Continuous Integration and Test Driven programming is. What people realize is a nameless magical connectivity between the guys who develop Things™ and the ones who bring them to production and the poor souls which have to keep it productive. In the late 90s there wasn’t a name for it. To make a good job Ops-Guys and the Dev-Guys have to work together – which wasn’t/isn’t a default behavior by nature.