As recommended by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, I’ve divided all layers of our web application into separate virtual machines using Xen. At a first glance, having virtual machines for every service sounds like quite some overhead. Isn’t it much simpler to just install the whole stack on one box and let it run? Why take the hassle … Continue reading Service Isolation By Virtualization
Author: Matthias Marschall
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.
How to Inflate And Deflate Data in Ruby and PHP
I had to port the client part of a PHP based client-server program, which received some XML data along with compressed images as binary data. As it cost me some time to inflate the received data in Ruby, I want to share what I found out about deflating and inflating data in Ruby and PHP. … Continue reading How to Inflate And Deflate Data in Ruby and PHP
Puppet vs. Capistrano – a short comparison
We’re currently using Capistrano not only to deploy our Ruby on Rails application, but also to setup and manage our physical and virtual (Xen based) servers. We have Capistrano recipes for adding users, installing packages like apache or mysql, configuring a Xen VM and more. Coming accross puppet, I started to wonder about the essential … Continue reading Puppet vs. Capistrano – a short comparison
Setup a Ruby on Rails Project Using the Lighthouse API With ActiveResource
As you might have already guessed, I'm constantly striving for the simplest yet most optimal process for running both an agile development team and agile web operations. People come first, then the procedures followed by the people and finally, the tools those people use. Since tools supporting the agile development process have the lowest priority … Continue reading Setup a Ruby on Rails Project Using the Lighthouse API With ActiveResource
Who Else Wants to Understand Cloud Computing?
Evaluating hosting scenarios for our Ruby on Rails based web application, I finally had a good reason to dig deeper into "cloud computing". While I was already watching the evolution of Amazon's web services like S3 and EC2, a lot of offerings nowadays labelled as "cloud computing" were quite new to me. To better understand … Continue reading Who Else Wants to Understand Cloud Computing?
Velocity – what will we be able to deliver this week?
The final building block of our introduction to agile is velocity. In addition to employing user stories to break down big features into manageable junks, maintaining a backlog for ruthless prioritizing, and story point estimates, velocity will help you find out what you can deliver in a week. Looking at "Yesterday's Weather" to Learn About … Continue reading Velocity – what will we be able to deliver this week?
Estimation of User Stories With Story Points as Abstract Size Measure
After discussing which issues we tried to solve by introducing agile practices to manage a remote development team, using User Stories to be able to compare requirements and building a Backlog for ruthless prioritizing I want to share our learnings about agile estimation of User Stories. As you might have experienced, estimating the time required … Continue reading Estimation of User Stories With Story Points as Abstract Size Measure
A Backlog for Ruthless Prioritizing
So far, I've talked about how I went for Introducing agile practices to manage a remote development team as well as User Stories - Making Sure Your Customers Get The First-class Seats. While User Stories are a good start, enforcing ruthless prioritization of these stories can really streamline your development processes. Priorities get mixed up … Continue reading A Backlog for Ruthless Prioritizing
User Stories – Making Sure Your Customers Get The First-class Seats
In my last post about Introducing Agile Practices to Manage a Remote Development Team I described the issues we faced with our existing development process and provided a step-by-step overview of the agile practices we implemented. In this post, I want to introduce you to the concept of User Stories and how you can use … Continue reading User Stories – Making Sure Your Customers Get The First-class Seats
Introducing Agile Practices to Manage a Remote Development Team Series
What would you say if I told you that you can double multiply the output of your development team while simultaneously increasing quality? Let me show you how I made this happen in a small team a couple of months ago. When I joined autoplenum.de in October 2007, roughly 10 months after its founding, "phase … Continue reading Introducing Agile Practices to Manage a Remote Development Team Series
