sazpaz

This speaks to me as I coincidentally decided to start automating my provisioning to standardize to the same vagrant environment.

I'm not a sysadmin or servers guy, but these days I happen to manage most of the devops and so getting servers and machines set up is my responsibility.

Ansible docs are not great for getting started, and I pretty much just learned by skimming through some Playbook, and figuring it out their — often intuitive — purpose.

After a few hours I got to a close to getting my machines set up with most of my Django stack: Nginx, Gunicorn, Redis, supervisor, celery, etc. The only thing that I couldn't properly set up was PostgreSQL. And here is something that most of these automation tools lack: debugging. When my postgres roles was failing, I had no clue how to even start debugging it, so after an hour or so, I just stepped back and went in to set it up manually.

I feel some of these tools need to be more friendly with devops that don't have quite the same knowledge and experience than the target audience of sysadmins and ops people. That said, I learned a ton starting to use Ansible and automated a big chunk of the process.

Robert Cialdini also brings the same theory in his book Influence. Not only that a tragedy prompts other to the same action, but he showed some studies where a type of tragedy prompted a seemingly irrelevant event.

For example, 2 days after a suicide appearing on the news, it is significantly (don't remember the exact numbers) more likely for there to be a plane crash. He attributes this to the fact that some pilots that have had suicidal thoughts are triggered by the suicidal news.

Another interesting study looked at how mortality rates of car accidents are higher after suicide-related news. This study found a surprising number of car deaths in which the driver was stepping on the gas pedal, instead of the break, which might be an indicator of suicide.

I've been wanting to build a quick side project for a couple weeks, so decided to give it a try today and put it up in App Engine instead of heroku.

Put simply, App Engine has a higher learning curve. I remember using heroku for the first time a couple years ago, and it was smooth and seamless. Can't say the same about App Engine. Installation isn't a blink, docs are scattered around, and even a simple Flask app isn't straightforward.

I understand they might offer more features, better prices, so side-projects are unlikely their target audience, but nevertheless if they want developers love, it should "just work".

Is this built on Ionic?