This first episode of Abnormal DevOps Iterations discusses various aspects of DevOps, particularly focusing on the tool Puppet and its evolution. The guest, Luke Kanies, the founder of Puppet, shares insights about the inception of Puppet and its significance in managing systems. He highlights the goal of making Puppet universally usable, unlike existing tools at the time, and reflects on both the best and worst technical decisions made during Puppet’s development, such as the use of Ruby instead of Python and some internal architectural choices.

Luke also talks about his personal journey, dealing with long COVID, and his career shift after stepping away from the day-to-day operations of Puppet.

He reflects on the broader IT landscape, the challenges of building automation tools, and the complexity of managing different operating systems. Despite the success of Puppet, he shares lessons learned, such as the importance of separating certain components into independent products.

The conversation explores the future of automation tools and the IT industry, with Luke emphasizing the need for more standalone, smaller tools and better visibility into system automation.

He also critiques the current state of open-source governance and the lack of a coherent strategy for sustaining innovation in both commercial and community-driven projects.