I like Django, MySQL, and Unicode, but getting all three to play together nicely can sometimes be a bit challenging. One of the more annoying things is getting Django to make a migration that will create a 255 character CharField that is encoded using the utf8mb4 character set and indexed.

I maintain a couple of IRC bots that help out with Wikimedia devops tasks. Jouncebot was a bot I started helping with when @mattofak moved on to other projects. Later I developed Stashbot as a replacement for using the Logstash that collected data for my SAL tool in Tool Labs.

Both bots are built using the awesome irc python library from Jason Coombs. I've copied various core irc behaviors from one bot to the other as I've discovered and fixed various bugs in how I was using the library. I finally got around to extracting these core parts into a Python library of it's own that I have named "IRC Bot Behavior Bundle" or IB3 for short.

I fell down a rabbit hole a few days ago. I wanted to write a blog post about my new irc library, but the rbenv I had setup to run Octopress was all messed up. I stated poking around to try and remind myself how to get it working again and eventually decided that I should really look for a new static site generator written in language that I like to use. I ended up picking Pelican.

Puppet has become my go to system management tool in no small part because it is the tool that the operations group at $DAYJOB has standardized on for our production infrastructure management. It took quite a while for me to get the hang of how Puppet does what it does, but today I'd say I'm a fairly decent Puppet programmer. Every once in a while however I stumble on something new and surprising.