April 2010

Self-brewed complexity is evil – fight it!

by Matthias Marschall on April 30, 2010 · 2 comments

It’s amazing to see again and again how teams complicate their lives without any necessity. They dream up features “urgently” required by their imaginary customers and then start a death march to launch them at an arbitrary, self-invented date. Why is it so hard to simplify things and get going? Let’s have a look at [...]

A/B Testing with Webrat

by Dan Ackerson on April 23, 2010 · 1 comment

It all began a year ago. We wanted to introduce a new navigation bar, but gradually, gaining feedback (and confidence) that it was the right upgrade for our users. My idea at that time was a random cookie which would show 20% of our users the new navigation while giving them a separate google analytics [...]

How to guide a team through a crisis

by Matthias Marschall on April 16, 2010 · 3 comments

No matter whether your team is self-organizing or not, when the shit hits the fan, they’ll need strict rules and close guiding to manage the crisis.

Why your boss will love Capistrano

by Dan Ackerson on April 9, 2010 · 4 comments

Scaleability is a term near and dear to a CTO’s heart. It’s also the most important factor in growing a website. If you want to avoid the “fail whale” at right, you have to be able to scale your application to run on hundreds (and, if you’re really lucky, thousands) of servers. Let’s take a [...]

Continuous Integration with Hudson

by Dan Ackerson on April 2, 2010 · 2 comments

Wow – a big, fancy phrase that may seem intimidating at first. Let’s break it down: “Continuous” meaning constantly, all the time; and “Integration” – building smaller parts into a larger whole. “Constantly Building” ? Well, that’s pretty darn close. So, what are we constantly building here? Sure, we’re churning out new features regularly, but [...]