After days, weeks, or even months of meticulously planning all of the large and small details of a conference or meeting, one might think that would translate into an easy job of event management. Just toss it on autopilot and make sure the logistics plan is followed. Wrong!

Think of meeting planning as training for a marathon. If you put in the training hours ahead of time, you’ve prepared yourself for the big race. However, no one believes actually running those 26.2 miles will be a breeze. Just the opposite….it’s the hardest, yet most rewarding, part.

When starting with the Puppet language, DevOps engineers want to dive right in and start making Puppet work for them. The issue, as old as programming itself, is that they or other programmers will need to be able to read and maintain their code in the future.

Puppet’s style guide has been developed to promote consistent formatting in the Puppet language, providing a common pattern, design, and style to follow when developing modules. As noted in the style guide: “This consistency in code and module structure makes it easier to update and maintain the code.”

When recently working on Puppet, I attempted to start my Vagrant VM. I ran the ‘vagrant ssh’ command but got an error that read “The executable 'powershell' Vagrant is trying to run was not found in the %PATH% variable. This is an error. Please verify this software is installed and on the path.”

The first thing I tried when I saw this message was to retry the command. Then I checked the path using the command $ echo %PATH%.

One of my favorite functions as a project manager at Thundercloud Labs is creating high quality conference and meeting events for our clients. These projects allow me to get my face out of my computer monitor and reach out to established contacts and new people. Since conference planning is almost always a team effort, building rapport, establishing good working relationships, and leading the effort with confidence is essential to successful event planning and execution. Tip: When you find a smart, creative, and reliable contact person on the outside, realize they can be key to your project’s success. If you can build a loose team of these type of people, you can expect stellar results for your events.

One of our goals in using Google Analytics is being able to understand the actions of our audience. By understanding our audience and the information that they find useful on our website, we can work to improve the quality of information we provide, improve the descriptions of our services and products, and as a result, attract more first-time and repeat visitors to the site.

One great method for understanding our website audience is to use the traffic source menu in Google Analytics. Traffic source allows you to see how many people and devices have visited your site.

Having a new member join an existing project is a great idea, conceptually. After all, another set of hands writing code and testing scripts can speed up the development process and ease the workload on all current team members. In practice things though, this is rarely the case.

When a member drops in and out of a project midway through the development cycle this means that at least one other member needs to commit time to helping that new member get up to speed. There are a number of prerequisites that need to be met before that member can start being productive. The new member needs to be briefed on the project and given all necessary files and instructions to the tasks that they will need to complete. He or she needs to get their work environment set up, this could include upgrading machines, installing software and creating user accounts. All of these tasks will undoubtedly require contact with multiple team members thus taking time away from multiple team members in the hopes that this new member will eventually decrease the total load on the rest of the team.

I have been working on an Organization Manual revision project for one of Thundercloud Labs’ larger clients since December. This project requires varying degrees of input from over 150 stakeholders across eight departments. The finished product will directly affect thousands of workers in the client’s organization crisscrossing the country...literally from Alaska to Florida and from New England to California. Cognizant of the project’s importance and its far-reaching impact, shortly after assignment, I sat down at my laptop and, over the course of a few hours, crafted a project plan for the coming months. And what an amazing project plan it was! I’m not ashamed to admit that I opened that .mpp file on more than one occasion to admire it in its pure, unexecuted beauty.

Setting up a Google Analytics account requires you to first have a Google account, which does not explicitly mean you need a Gmail account. In order to get started, a Google account must be created. If you would prefer to use an existing email address, enter your email information and then validate the information through a link that will be emailed to you.

Formatting data in a usable and concise form can sometimes be an issue in our line of work. During our last project, we were tasked with redesigning an application form into a cloud-based, web-accessible form. At the end of this cycle, we were faced with another formatting problem – the cloud-based application printed across twice as many pages as the original application form, so we needed a solution that would result in nicely formatted printed reports.