Week 8: Doppelbock

This week's blog post title comes from my very brief period as a beer nerd about 15 years ago. I should have known it was hopeless; I'm already too many other kinds of nerd, and I really like to buy the same session IPA or Italian pilsner over and over again (for some reason not everyone agrees with this, but actually all beer should be about 4.5% ABV). People started bringing all these different imperial stouts over my house and expecting me to drink them in the middle of the afternoon... it was a very confusing time.

Anyhow, I mention all of this because, as we all know, the popular(?) "Bock" or Doppelbock style of beer comes from the German for "goat". I've mentioned our goat command line tool here in the past, but I'm extra excited to mention it this week, because it's now available in Homebrew !

This is a big deal. Like any dev team of our size, we create a lot of little glorified shell scripts CLI tools for working with different parts of our stack, and maintain them to varying degrees, but the work involved in going from "internal tool" to "an app that we want our community to install and enjoy" is a meaningful leap. As recently as a couple weeks ago, we were still adding our new features for Lexicon management into a totally different tool called glot , and it's only this month that we've been able to say "this is all in goat, you should install goat, goat is our guy."

Goat, for the record, is named "Go AT", because it's a Go tool for working with the AT protocol — great stuff, self-explanatory, somehow that wasn't already taken by another popular CLI tool. As I've mentioned , I really like Go for building straightforward, maintainable tools — it's a nicely inflexible language, and it's super portable, very easy to build and release Go apps for Windows/Mac/Linux. This makes it a great fit for Homebrew! Although Homebrew started out as a Mac package manager (and it thankfully handles Mac binary signing for you), many maintainers publish Linux source/builds of Homebrew packages as well, and I've always been a "just give me a bleeding edge userspace package manager" guy (yes I used Arch for a while, please @ me, my Ubuntu experiments always ended horribly with 20 different PPAs conflicting). This means that Homebrew is also my package manager of choice for Linux and Windows too, where I do most of my CLI work under WSL . I have had won arguments in more than one past DevRel role about whether we should recommend Homebrew as a way to install our tooling on all platforms, not just Mac. So I am very happy right now.

And, if I didn't already mention it last week, the new Lexicon management features that got merged into goat are all part of really exciting work we're doing around relaunching our AT docs site with a new Lexicon repository... I don't want to share too much yet, but maybe one sidebar screenshot can't hurt...

Picture Pepe le Pew going "awooga" with the big eyes at this. That's what working on docs is like for me all the time.

In other news,

Graze posted this great writeup on how they're handling AT data at scale. We have some more guidance coming here too, in the context of backfilling the network... wait for it...

Conference planning is picking up! Get those talks submitted to the CFP ! I'm wrangling all my engineering colleagues to submit talks! Don't make me wrangle in vain!

And last but not least, we got a very cool guide to deploying a PDS on a Synology NAS submitted to our deploy-recipes repo yesterday. Personally I have about 60TB puttering away under my router (I feel like I'm giving away too much about myself this week) and I can't wait to try this one out.

The holidays are coming soon! Be vigilant!