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Well here we are at Open Source World with another guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

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I'm Luke Knies. I'm the founder of The Puppet Project and Reductive Labs.

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So it was several months ago that you guys got the VC funding there and became a real adult company.

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As unlikely as it seems, that was only like six weeks ago actually.

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And in that expansive time, what have you guys been up to since your big news announcements there?

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Mostly we've been deleting email from people who are trying to sell us used furniture.

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But in addition, we're beginning to hire.

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So we've got some developers on who are actually getting work done.

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And we're starting to figure out how we're going to sell things and build better, interesting projects.

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And so there's a lot getting done, but most of it is relatively hidden other than the developers talking on our lists and actually writing code.

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And so did you hire the developers from the community as a sort of standard, or how did you come about finding them?

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There are some developers in the community we would like to hire, and they will not be hired.

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So we've got this guy, Bryce Figueroa, who is French, and he is really, really great.

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But he works at a board game company, and he loves his board game company.

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A board game company?

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A board game company.

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Huh.

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Yes.

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So we'd love to hire him.

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We're first in line.

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But as it is, we're a very sysadmin-strong community and not as many developers.

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Apparently it's no dice with him.

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No dice at all.

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So instead, we've found somebody in Portland, and we've just moved our company to Portland, which is a big deal to me anyway.

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And we're hiring people there.

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So the people we have so far are all in Portland that we've found, and they're not in the community, unfortunately.

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So we have to learn.

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We have to teach them Puppet, and it's a little bit slower.

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So do you think being in Portland has been, you know, the company being in Portland, do you think that's been beneficial in that sense, or is it just sort of coincidental?

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It's been fantastic.

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It really has.

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Part of it is that I'm less than two hours by air from San Francisco, so I can spend more time with my family when I travel.

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But there's a very strong Ruby community there.

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There's a very strong open-source community there.

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And there's just a lot of unemployed people there.

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So that works out really well.

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It's a great combination.

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But even the Linux Foundation was there.

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There's so many people who are interested and involved in technology and open-source and Ruby that there's a great pool of people.

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So it sounds like you have gotten to the point where you don't have to do sort of putting out fires and bug fixes, but you can work on the future of Puppet, if you will.

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Exactly.

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And that was one of the main keys of the investment was to get some of us above the fray where we're not the ones who are responding to every bug ticket, but we're instead being allowed to think ahead and, you know, what's going to come in six months?

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What's the best thing we can do for the community?

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What's the most interesting problem we can solve instead of, oh, look, I have to fix cron support or, oh, look at that, you know, Solaire's zones aren't working anymore or things like that.

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And so, like you said, you were saying the exact things they're working on are top secret or whatnot.

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But, like, what, I mean, can you give us some idea of what's going on in the next sort of year or so?

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Yeah, I don't think they vary our top secret.

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Part of it's we're an open-source company.

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We're trying to find that balance between exposing all of our long-term strategic plans to the enemy but also being an open company.

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So the thing that we're really doing, we're focusing on is this web console where you have access via the web to a lot of the important data that's going on in your network.

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So the reports that are coming in from your clients, correlating those reports to the configurations that resulted in changes happening, looking at all your nodes, what the status of those nodes is, are they up to date, are they making changes, do they have a failure.

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So having all that information in a web console is definitely our highest priority, and we're working on that right now.

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And as soon as we can get, you know, the code should be available any day, but it's not even an alpha.

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It's not a functional application.

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We're just doing the development, and we should have something in, you know, a month or two.

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So essentially it's sort of a web-based UI to report about what's going on with Puppet, if you will, and what it's working over and so forth and so on.

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And it's not all read-only.

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So you can do things like create new nodes, and we hope to have integration with provisioning tools.

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And, you know, if you're going to remove a node, you can do it in this location.

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You can sign certificates, and all those kind of things are going to come through this interface.

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You shouldn't code in a GUI interface, but you should do, there are some things that just make sense in a GUI.

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Oh, that makes sense.

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Well, great.

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Well, thanks for the quick update.

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All right.

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Thank you.