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 … Continue reading Why your boss will love Capistrano
Continuous Integration with Hudson
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 … Continue reading Continuous Integration with Hudson
Using Kanban For DevOps Projects
This is a guest post by Robert Dempsey, CEO & Founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions. He helps clients with agile training and builds products like scrum'd. I wish I had known about Kanban when I was a network administrator. It would have helped me immensely in terms of prioritization of work and making everything we … Continue reading Using Kanban For DevOps Projects
Rethinking code reuse with Modularity for Ruby
This is a guest post by our friends over at makandra, a cool Ruby on Rails development shop. Today they announce a great new Ruby gem for dealing with separating concerns in your ActiveRecord models. Reusing code is hard. But although we knew that high-level components don't work, we found ourselves rewriting similar code again … Continue reading Rethinking code reuse with Modularity for Ruby
DevOps: Why Silos Suck And How To Break Them
Divide and conquer, Caesar's strategy to break huge problems down into smaller parts, is an outdated model for structuring teams and organizations. Breaking teams apart by area like development, QA, operations, product management, etc, creates silo like divisions of labor. Unfortunately, these divisions create so many "walls of confusion" between the silos that your speed … Continue reading DevOps: Why Silos Suck And How To Break Them
Stop. Reflect. Adapt. The 3 Steps to Stop Writing Bad Code
Writing software that doesn't suck is hard - even for the pros. The problem doesn't lie in solving a hard problem, but in creating a solution which is easy to understand, robust, and easy to change. A lot of problems in teams and organizations stem from bad code. Bad code ruins the motivation of your … Continue reading Stop. Reflect. Adapt. The 3 Steps to Stop Writing Bad Code
20 DevOps guys you should follow
DevOps is an approach to bridge the gap between agile software development and operations. The DevOps tribe is a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues, and fun. The DevOps Tribe Here is a list of some of the most active guys in … Continue reading 20 DevOps guys you should follow
Agile Links From The Archives
One finding from our survey was that a lot of you want to read more about agile basics. As most of you haven't followed Agile Web Operations since Day One, here's a list of the top three posts about agile and kanban: Agile Is About Feedback, Not About Fancy Practices Kanban vs. Iterative Development Kanban … Continue reading Agile Links From The Archives
RSpec Tips & Tricks
Throughout the last couple of days, I did a bigger refactoring of our Ruby on Rails application. As I changed quite a few moving parts, I covered everything I did with RSpec. It's really an incredible feeling to have all your bases covered with automated tests when you finally start the manual regression test. Along … Continue reading RSpec Tips & Tricks
Agile Web Operations: What do YOU want it to be?
For nearly two years Dan and I have shared our experiences and ideas about agile development and system administration. With every post we hoped to be helpful, and maybe some of them even were... Now, as we approach 500 subscribers, we would like to ask you, our dear readers, how we could help you to … Continue reading Agile Web Operations: What do YOU want it to be?
