Developer Productivity
Our encapsulated builds allow a lot of flexibility as to where we want them to run. I previously floated the idea of not needing Jenkins at all, perhaps triggering an AWS Lambda using git hooks. While digging around the Lambda options, I started thinking ahead to the process of retrieving the repo contents and all…
Do you think about the physical environment you’re working in and how it affects you? I mean beyond that basics of a good chair and an appropriately positioned monitor. This small series will introduce some things to consider that may help make your workplace a healthier, more productive and pleasant place to be. First up,…
I recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport about the importance of focus for knowledge work. It’s a very compelling read and provides plenty of justification and strategies to improve your ability to focus. It touched on many distraction issues that had been nagging me for a while so I knew I was in the…
Running an encapsulated build on Jenkins using Conveyor
The initial approach to running Maven through Conveyor used MavenCli. I found it a bit awkward to use with regards to sorting it’s dependencies and passing commands. It also relies a bit too much on the build machine having some pre-existing things in place such as setting.xml Maven Wrapper is a much nicer solution. It’s…
This is a continuation of Pipelines as code…not text There’s an art to writing frameworks: you have to balance helpfulness with flexibility. I recently wrote a test framework to help migrate a large, slow, unusable regression suite from Rational Tester to a more manageable form. There were thousands of test cases and they were going…
This is a follow on to my post on pipelines in Breaking down barriers It also bugs me that the pipelines can only really run on a server. That makes some sense in terms of security, concurrency, resources and moat building but not when it comes to constructing or modifying the behaviour of the pipeline…
I got a great tip for stand-up meetings from my friend Darryn. He was a QA on my team at the time but secretly moonlighting as an Agile Coach. A stand-up is a quick morning meeting held to update the rest of the team about progress on current tasks or stories of the sprint. It…
The field of “Artificial Intelligence” has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering. Each cycle of the marketing hype tweaks the name a little while continuing to over-promise. We’re a long way from Artificial General Intelligence where an intelligent agent can understand and learn anything a human can. However there have been some good advances…
I saw a talk by Dave Farley a while ago in which he said that everything should be under source control. It makes sense; with source control you can go back and forward to any version of something you want.Made a mistake? No problem, roll back to the last known good code.Need an audit trail…