Talk: A Usability Tour of Puppet

“Let’s take Mary Poppins’ advice and start from the very beginning. `Puppet` – what happens if you type `puppet` on the command line? This is what you get you get: a usage message, which is completely sane, and then you get this list of comma delimited available commands

“So this could use some work, this could be improved, but before we get to that let’s talk about what it does right. And let’s use this discussion as a way of creating and pulling out some useful command line interaction principles.”

Held in the beautiful Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam’s old commodity exchange, PuppetConf 2011 was my introduction to the Puppet community. I wanted to help them understand what design was, and why Puppet had hired someone like me.