A lot of what I learned about managing servers came from this project and talking to Maciej (the author of DebOps). I started using DebOps around 5 years ago.

A lot of what I learned about managing servers came from this project and talking to Maciej (the author of DebOps). I started using DebOps around 5 years ago. I naturally found it after realizing how much effort it takes to really configure a production ready server. It was nice to see someone had already invested years of effort into a project like that. That got me going so much faster than starting at ground zero (which I did for like 6 months before I found this project and started contributing to it instead). I mean, I can write a novel about Maciej but the TL;DR is after 20 years of freelancing I've never met a single person who is as knowledge as him when it comes to general sysadmin knowledge, but then you factor in his attention to detail, patience and work ethic and you end up with something special. 5,200+ commits over 6 years is mind boggling (15+ commits a day on average) and everything is done by the books (signing off on commits, impeccable changelog, etc.). The project is ran with code quality standards that rival / exceed some major open source projects. All I'll say is, I'm very happy to have met him and to have stumbled upon his creation all those years ago. We are lucky to have such high quality Ansible material to use freely.