July 2010

The Irresistable Pull To Self Organization

by Matthias Marschall on July 29, 2010 · 2 comments

Every organization has to deal with a mix of ongoing and project oriented work. But, even if you structure your teams into departments to optimize ongoing work, they keep trying to self organize into project focused teams.

Far Future Expires Headers For Ruby On Rails With Nginx

by Matthias Marschall on July 20, 2010 · 0 comments

Browsers load static images from your website again and again if your web server does not send an expires header with a date far in the future. To avoid that unnecessary traffic on your servers and unnecessary load times for your users, it’s a good idea to let your nginx send those expires headers. But, [...]

In “The Moving Parts of Opscode Chef” there was an interesting discussion about the need of a highly available chef server if you want to use opscode chef as your configuration management tool of choice. Especially for small to medium sized enviroments running your own chef server is overkill. If you don’t want to use [...]

Scrum alone won’t cut it

by Matthias Marschall on July 6, 2010 · 2 comments

Scrum is a great framework for organizing projects. It defines exact roles and procedures to structure your work environment. You gain a lot of visibility and you empower your teams. All that is great. But in software development or operations it’s not sufficient. You need an underlying set of values and practices which drive quality [...]