I happened to stumble into a troubleshooting session where one person was trying to set up a container based development environment in order to do some work with Python 2.7 and Ansible. It was very stubbornly not working, and, while discussing various avenues of investigation (is it the Ansible version, the virtual environment, is poetry doing something etc.), I also decided to ask why - more specifically "Why Python 2.7?". The resulting discussion and tweets are the main catalyst for this post.

About seven years later, I think it's high time for an update to one of the most useful (judging by views and search traffic) articles on this blog: A Usable And Good Looking Shell On Windows. Things have improved massively in Windows 10 with the introduction of WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), the Windows Terminal, and VSCode Remote integrations.

It all started with a question about Ansible - someone was getting a False when they were expecting a True after converting a variable using the bool filter. The solution to that particular problem was fairly easily found, but one additional detail caused me to go down the proverbial rabbit hole.

Every (networking related) event or conference out there has at least some talk about automation - with the audience divided into people who are politely interested, because they have been doing it for years... and the others who never wrote one line of code in their life, watching with desperation in their eyes yet another presentation they don't really understand heralding the end of their careers as they know it. There's a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) out there and it's driven by the "expert tech journalist" mouthpieces and non-stop marketing machines, but as with all things the noise has an effect on people. And not a beneficial one. So as a network admin, operator, engineer, architect, what are you to do?

Taking regular snapshots of device configuration is something everyone hopefully does, but having them in a version control system as text files provides all the benefits of a full revision history. Depending on the front-end you might even get good looking diffs, and all that for very little effort!