Here are the slides from my presentation at BarCamp London a few weekends ago. Sorry for the delay, I was hoping to secure permission to distribute the slides with one of the images I used at BarCamp, but I wasn't able to.
I was lucky enough to be at Reboot 10, back at the end of June. I gave a prototype talk working through some ideas I've been thinking about for a while (stuff that I started to work at with my Everything I know about Programming I learnt from Typography talk at the first BarCamp London). The talk was called Craft & Process, and was essentially a braindump and not a real talk - I had a bunch of sketchy notes for an overall structure and talked my way from the start of the notes tothe end...
While writing Rails apps, I've written several variants on the 'give me an ActiveRecord instance that can't talk to the DB' theme over the last couple of years while writing tests or specs for an app. The basic pattern is a pretty good one - it guarantees you a certain degree of test isolation for your unit tests or specs, when you need it. And, because you're make specific instances isolated, you can get to the DB if you need to.
Something I found myself wrestling with a lot towards the end of my time at the BBC, and something I've been thinking a lot about since, is the deployment of entire servers, not just the deployment of software onto servers. I've spent nearly ten years working with Linux distributions and their OS package management systems, primarily Red Hat and Debian-based systems (Ubuntu, lately). I've also spent a lot of time working with Python and Ruby's OS-independent packaging systems (Distutils, a tiny bit of Setuptools, and Rubygems).
Well, it's been a couple more weeks than I promised (that Christmas, it gets everywhere), but here's the first follow-up from my dpkg-tools from December.