I've been working at NetDoktor for three months now. Half way through my trial period, I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect where the last few months have brought me and where I still want to go. Source Code Control I started my work last December of course by spending a lot … Continue reading What I’ve Learned So Far
Visibility Builds Trust
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 … Continue reading Visibility Builds Trust
Introducing Your Team to Agile Using Pivotal Tracker
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 … Continue reading Introducing Your Team to Agile Using Pivotal Tracker
A Simple Checklist To Multiply Productivity
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 … Continue reading A Simple Checklist To Multiply Productivity
Memcache for Dummies
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. Memcached … Continue reading Memcache for Dummies
A Luxury Problem: How Emerging Iterations Eat Team Commitment For Breakfast
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 … Continue reading A Luxury Problem: How Emerging Iterations Eat Team Commitment For Breakfast
BREAKING: Caching Saves Server Lives!
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 - … Continue reading BREAKING: Caching Saves Server Lives!
Howto Get Started With Carpet
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 … Continue reading Howto Get Started With Carpet
Configuring MAMP for Development
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 … Continue reading Configuring MAMP for Development
Configuration Management remixed: Introducing Carpet
Migrating our production environment from debian to OpenSolaris I wanted to simplify our configuration management recipes along the way. What I came up with is a mixture of Puppet style manifests and Capistrano backed ease of use in a new open source project called: Carpet. Building Your Infrastructure With Plain Capistrano Initially we've built our … Continue reading Configuration Management remixed: Introducing Carpet
