Blogs: kim

We use Perforce at Splunk, and it’s worked out pretty well for us. I’m a CVS admin at heart, and I know there’s some SVN sentiment, but p4 gives us a nice mix of atomic commits, attractive GUI and command-line tools, and someone to call for help if it ever completely eats itself.

Over time I’ve compiled a small library of scripts for various p4 functions that have been written time and again at different sites…mergetool is one of them. This little tool accepts a merge target (“yours” in p4-speak) and projectile (“theirs” in p4), labels both, performs an integrate, and performs a “safe” resolve -as. It logs any failures for you to resolve by hand, or submits the change set if…

Like a lot of tech companies, Splunk’s development organization isn’t a model of perfect gender balance. For a year and a half now, I’ve been the only woman in the dev organization.

Surprisingly, this is not an uncomfortable place to be. In 11 years in industry I’ve worked in a variety of organizations: the now-bankrupt dot-com best known for putting an ad with a naked guy up during the Super Bowl, 2 major marquee names with vastly differing corporate cultures, a security start-up stocked with emancipated-minor hackers. Aside from that doomed dot-com — which had a surprisingly strong gender balance throughout technical roles and a culture blessedly free of gender-based intimidation at all levels — Splunk may be the most…

Splunk runs on a lot of platforms for a relatively young product and that number is always increasing. The day I started, there were packages for Intel and PowerPC Macintoshes, i686 Linux, Solaris 8 on Sparc, and FreeBSD on x86, all created with BitRock InstallBuilder, run from a simple shell script, usually by Erik. There really wasn’t much control over what went into the installer — if a file was in the installer prep directory and the shell script didn’t know to delete it, out it went.

By the time 2.1 was on its way, we’d decided to switch to native packages, and our list of platforms had expanded to include Solaris on Intel, with several more on the horizon. We…

Hi! My name is Kim, and I’m the release engineer here at Splunk.

Thanks to my acquisition-happy former employer, Symantec, I’ve seen a variety of startup approaches to release engineering. Most frequently it seems some senior developer has a bug up you-know-where about how the build system should work, and some poor junior developer or sysadmin type person dutifully does the drudge work (usually by hand). At other sites, some very diligent and detail-oriented person creates and executes a process with a great deal of record-keeping and attention to detail but often not a lot of automation. Consistency across different build platforms usually isn’t a strong point.

Here at Splunk, things are a bit different. I called myself the plumber in the…