Migrating our production environment from debian to OpenSolaris I wanted to simplify our configuration management recipes along the way. What I came up with is a mixture of Puppet style manifests and Capistrano backed ease of use in a new open source project called: Carpet.
January 2009
Last week I made an honest mistake that caused severe downtime on our website. Of course, I spent a lot of time thinking about all the contributing factors which ultimately caused such a nexus in the space-time continuum to appear over my keyboard at that crucial moment when I hit the enter key. It didn’t [...]
This is a guest post by Andrew Shafer, who is part of Reductive Labs, the people behind Puppet. Reductive Labs is helping people build better systems with better tools and processes. Andrew has been on several Agile software teams in various capacities for the past few years, and has a passion for applying Agile principles [...]
After using Pivotal Tracker myself for a couple of weeks, I recently migrated our complete development from Mingle to Tracker. Migrating existing data between tools using CSV is always a pain. It starts with Mingle using tabs as a separator instead of, well, commas. Of course, you have different field names to match up, and [...]
Have you ever taken a midnight drive down a dirt road without any headlights on? While its certainly a thrilling (and stupid) thing to do, I certainly wouldn’t recommend doing the same thing with your data center. Do you have any idea if the load your servers experienced this morning was unusually high? Could you [...]
Like Dan did recently, I was setting up a Subversion repository one year ago. Of course, I also wanted to have regular backups of my Subversion repository. As I was tired of writing bash scripts for such a task, I looked into writing a simple Ruby script for backing up my Subversion repositories. Full and [...]
How do you decide who in the company should have access to the test and production environments? Opening it up to everyone is one extreme which in today’s security sensitive world is no longer an option. At the far other end, granting only one person access, while perhaps more secure (depending on who you’ve entrusted [...]
As I’ve shown in my plea to Agile Tool Vendors: Please simplify my life, I currently see only Pivotal Tracker to be a tool which simplifies my life instead of managing complexity. Enterprise Class vs Opinionated Software
Last week, I showed you how to setup a secure subversion server. Today, I’d like to show you how to technically accomplish a couple of development themes that are near and dear to my heart. The first is creating a quality gate with a release branch and creating a team of committers who are the [...]
