So, back in November, I joined a startup in Mountain View called MobileIron. We do mobile device management for Android and iOS tablets and cellphones, and we’re taking off like a rocket. I’m the DevOps manager there, and I’m looking for a solid DevOps engineer to help me out.
So, without further ado, here’s the actual job posting. Apply via the site if you fit the bill, and I’m looking forward to seeing your resume!
I’ve had a few people ask me how I did the #FollowFriday flood on Twitter the other day. I was continually spitting out #FF recommendations on people to follow at the rate of 4 per hour, for nearly 24 hours. Obviously, I wasn’t at my computer keyboard grinding these things out. I’d had the list pre-prepared, and I replaced myself with a small shell script and a rather large Perl program to get this done.
Now, I’ve got to preface this by saying there’s a lot of services out there on the web that can automatically schedule tweets via a webform for you. I didn’t necessarily want to do that – not only did manually scheduling a time for each tweet sound tedious, but I didn’t want to give OAuth rights to yet another entity on the internet.
Enter the Linux command line here, and the Perl program known as TTYtter. I’ve been using TTYtter for a while now as a Twitter client when I don’t want to context-switch to a GUI (I’ve been head-down in a bash shell for weeks now), and I knew that TTYtter could be called via a one-shot command line.
So, what I did was write a very tiny shell script wrapper around TTYtter that simply calls TTYtter in a loop every so often, reading in one line from a file as a tweet each time it runs. This let me prepare a text file that had a tweet per line, and that was rather easy to put together when I sat down and knocked it out.
Then all I had to do was a little after midnight on Friday was fire up a screen session, run my shell script, and detach. I ran this from an Amazon cloud VM so I didn’t have to worry about it not finishing. I also put the whole thing in my Dropbox directory so I could edit it or work on it from anywhere.
It worked great. :)
Here’s the shell script around TTYtter, in the event one of you wants to do the same thing.
#!/bin/bash
# Let’s set a sleep time between tweets (in seconds)
SLEEP_TIME=900
# Set our OAuth Key
OAUTH=~/Dropbox/ttytter/wildbill.key
# Set our path to TTYtter
TTY_BIN=~/bin/ttytter
# Set our FollowFriday tweet file
FF_FILE=~/Dropbox/followfriday/ff-wildbill.txt
# Now do some stuffs!
while read line; do $TTY_BIN -ssl -keyf=$OAUTH -status=”$line”; sleep $SLEEP_TIME; done < $FF_FILE
Remember to use your powers for good, not evil, kiddos.
So yesterday was my last day at Dash Navigation / Research in Motion. Changing jobs is always bittersweet for me, but yesterday was unusually difficult because I’d made some truly great friends there. I’ve been lucky to be on some high-performing teams, but I’d never had a job where every member of the team was just uncommonly awesome. I’m proud of working with those folks, and proud of what we all achieved as a team.
When my new opportunity came up, I struggled with it on the basis that I’d be leaving a bunch of incredible folks and moving on to things unknown. However, I realized that Dash Navigation isn’t the same plucky little company it used to be since the Research in Motion acquisition, things have slowly been inching inexorably toward being “RIM-ized”. I know how I am, and I tend to love being in an environment where I can jump in and do anything that’s needed, rather than having to jump from silo to silo with requests for firewall changes, switch port provisioning, and other things.
I figured it was time to find a startup-y place that could use me, and I landed a position with some friends and old Dash coworkers at a place that’s literally blocks from the old office. So while one chapter draws to a close, a new one starts. I’ll miss the folks I worked with daily at Dash, and I made some great contacts at RIM corporate. I certainly wish all of them well and hope they have lots of future success.
Check, check one… sibilance…. sibilance… check, check two, sibilance, sibilance….