In 2025 I started adding more and more things to Home Assistant, starting with my Daikin A/C and temperature/humidity sensors. One of the thing I wanted was to manage my audio system. Over the years I have tried multiple things, including using a raspberry pi with a recreated Pi Music Box implementation based on docker. I eventually settled for using said raspberry pi as a headless Spotify player connected to my Hifi. This meant that my only source of audio was Spotify, which to be fair kind of worked but limited my choices. I also had a DVD-CD player connected to my amplifier and my whole collection of CD ripped in FLAC format, but I rarely used the first option and didn’t have the second one accessible to be played. ...
Designing a terraform workflow - part 1 (the context)
For my current client, I had to design and implement a green field solution to manage AWS resources and decided to base it on Terraform. Because my client is a company operating in a regulated environment, there are a few regulatory constraints that need to be met, but the idea was to automate them as much as possible as part of the workflow instead of having manual steps and policies. A very interesting aspect was that my client wanted to allow as many of its employees as possible to experiment with new AWS technologies as freely as possible, instead of relying on a limited team of “devops” designing “blueprints”. The idea was that leveraging AWS innovation this way would be more effective. But at the same time, there was a need to have safe-guards and controls in place to meet the regulatory requirements. ...
A New Hope^h^h^hblog
While organising Devopsdays conferences around the world I’ve had plenty of occasions to talk about the things that motivated me initially to write in my old blog so it quickly dwindled. Since then though I’ve continued doing technical stuff and occasionally wanted to talk about it. So here we are…
Réponse au post de l'Institut Agile : "Devops - premières rencontres et survol"
This post is exceptionally in french, since I wasn’t able to comment directly on the institut agile blog. N’ayant pu répondre dans les commentaires sur le blog de l’institut agile, je le fais exceptionnellement ici, en français. Laurent, Merci pour ce compte-rendu, je n’ai malheureusement pas été en mesure de venir à ce premier meetup-parisien. Je m’inscris un peu en faux sur l’impression que me donne ta phrase “Vous aurez compris qu’on est entre techniciens…”. ...
Devops Meetups and Devops Dojos
Devopsday USA 2010 and the first Silicon Valley Devops Meetup In late june/early july this year I went to San Francisco for devopsday USA 2010 that I had the pleasure to co-organize with Damon Edwards, Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer. I really enjoyed the experience and am glad so many people came to attend the conference (spéciale dédidace to the French Diaspora: Alexis, Olivier, Patrice and Jérôme). I look forward now for another chance to contribute to the next events! ...
Why I Don't Want a 1024x600 Screen
I know this is slightly off topic, but I’ve been complaining a lot lately about 1024x600 screens on twitter and I probably need to explain why :) Apparently, lately 4:3 was declared deprecated and bad, so everyone moved to 16:10 or 16:9 formats. It was alright for me as long as the resolution was above 1024x768, but unfortunately almost all the netbooks and tablets seem to be afflicted with a 1024x600 screen. Except Apple’s Ipad. ...
The Certified DBA
Yesterday my friend and ex-colleague Iain send me a link to this dailyWTF article. I felt the content of the article and of (most of) the comments were so wrong on so many levels I had to write something about it… The RedHat Performance Tuning course I suspect he did this because he remembered a heated discussion I had in a team meeting with our team leader back when Iain and myself worked together: our team leader was coming back from a “Red Hat Performance Tuning” course and said there was a lot of things that we could do to improve the performance of our systems, including: ...
Self Documented Agile Infrastructure
In my latest position, as an IT Operations Manager I was confronted to the classic problems of a non-mature Operations: We were understaffed, in a fire-fighting mode, there was poor documentation (either missing or not up-to-date, often misleading), almost no backup, and the team members had almost no overlap in their skillsets and were demotivated. I couldn’t afford to lose a single person of my team as the knowledge lost would be dire for the company, and to make things even more complicated, our CEO wanted us to be able to deploy our home made software to remote client sites. ...
On the Shortcomings of Systems and Networks Engineers Training
As far I know, there is no course to become a Systems and Networks Engineer, aside from courses to learn (and gain certification in) a given vendor’s product. In fact, back in my university years, I remember that my teachers seemed to assume that there was no interest in this kind of thing as learning the options and caveats of a particular product was all you needed. In their eyes, algorithmic and development approaches (RAD and OO at the time) were where the real focus lay. ...
Yet Another Blog?
Hello there! In this introduction post I will try to explain why on earth I’ve started Yet Another Blog. For years now I’ve exchanged ideas about IT Infrastructure and Operations with my colleagues and friends, be they IT Ops guys or dev dudes (or even from a completely different background). I’ve learned a lot from those discussions and I believe my work has matured as a result. Lately though, this flow of communication has dried up for several reasons and I’ve grown frustrated about it, hence the idea of this blog. Hopefully it will allow for fruitful interaction with people I know and indeed others that I don’t know. People with whom I am impatient to share ideas and experience! ...