Last week, the CTO of a partner company came over to me and asked: “Hey Matthias, do you have any benchmarks on how many commits your developers do each day? And how many lines of code they produce? I would love to compare the performance of our teams to be able to show my CEO [...]
February 2009
Last week I held my first meeting at NetDoktor, introducing the rest of the company to both what I’m doing and how I organize my work. Of course, I’d dropped the ‘agile’ word around the office from time to time and, suprisingly, most everyone had some idea of what it meant. Sure, it was some [...]
Maybe this sounds familiar to you: To maximize advertising revenues, it is necessary to constantly optimize ad placements, ad layouts and ad formats used on your site. This leads to a flood of really small user stories, which are often written like this: Please put 3 AFS ads after the first search result, 3 ads [...]
I mentioned last week that compromises suck. The first step to a win-win situation for everyone is to grab memcached and get it up and running. And don’t let the title insult your intelligence – it’s more of a warning to those that have decided memcache is just a fad which will soon pass.
We’ve managed our complete development with Pivotal Tracker for over a month now, and never looked back. All in all, our administrative overhead simply vanished and the flow of implementing user stories smoothed out quite a bit. All’s well that ends well, you might want to say. But the last couple of weeks raised some [...]
I know, I know – last week, I promised a post about hooking up Xdebug to Eclipse along with some nifty profiling howto. But, unfortunately, real life managed to intervene again! Every site has its peaks, and every knowledgeable sysadmin automatically keeps an eye on the server farm during this time. Let’s face it – [...]
In my post about Carpet is a re-mix of existing configuration management solutions, I gave you a rough overview of the problems I tried to address with Carpet. In this article, I want to show you how you can set up a complete Ruby on Rails stack with only a few lines of configuration while [...]
With all the LAMP stacks in the world, its hard to imagine we need yet another howto blog post. But I did have some trouble getting things running smoothly on my Mac and I’d like to share my experiences with you, the gentle reader. Living-e bundles Apache, MySQL and PHP stack for the Mac called [...]

