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Are you sure your CI setup is doing anything useful?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:01:09 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Continuous Integration (CI) is used, especially within large distributed teams and kept coming back to a lightning talk I delivered at the Scottish Ruby Conference in 2010.

It talked about the common strategy of running your CI tool off of your ‘master’ or ‘gold’ branch – which is probably the one that ends up going into production – once someone has pushed their code up to that branch of your repository. I’ll call that branch ‘deployable’.

The problem with that is that if someone on your team hasn’t, or couldn’t run your tests / build your application before pushing up – you’ve got broken code right there in the branch that should always be deployable and your CI tool going crazy.

A new job for the new year and speaking at SRC 2011

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:39:49 GMT

The coming year has me filled with excitement and a little trepidation. For one thing, I’m leaving the wonderful PCCL, where I have been privileged to work since January 2007 to join the team at FreeAgent Central.

This is a big change for me and it seems fitting that I’ll be starting the New Year in a shiny new job. I’ll deeply miss my friends and colleagues from PCCL and am grateful for nearly 4 great years of fun challenges, interesting work and a great working environment.

I’m going to be speaking at the 2011 Scottish Ruby Conference on the subject of the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS); a subject which has been a very intimate part of the last year of my professional life. If you’re coming along, come see me speak and I’ll talk about how you can use Free and Open Source Software to help reduce the cost of compliance.

Ruby / Rails the 'Enterprise' and how software works in the 'real world'

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:55:54 GMT

The ‘real world’ is an emotive term when it comes to software development. It parcels off your skills and experience to one side and holds it against and in comparison to a mythical archetype of ‘reality’ which seems to have little, if any, relevance to how, where and why you work. In this context, the ‘real world’ is subjective and is defined by the person who is making the comparison.

The ‘enterprise’ is another one of these terms which conjures up different images for different people and is the subject of many debates across the internet, especially in the Ruby world.

In this post, I draw upon my own work and personal experience to discuss both these topics and try to see where Ruby and Rails sit in the ‘real world’ as it pertains to me, and within the ‘enterprise’.

Ruby and Rails people are rampant Cargo Cultists

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 23:28:47 GMT

A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that has appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.

From time to time, the term “cargo cult” is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance.

From the Wikipedia Cargo Cult Article.

You may be familiar with the story that our (the UK that is) Prince Philip (The Duke of Edinburgh) is venerated as a god by the Yaohnanen tribe on the southern island of Tanna in Vanuatu. A similar thing happens pretty much every single time a shiny new ‘paradigm shifting technology’ pops up the the Ruby world.

Introducing Geekspaces - A Business Idea

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:24:59 GMT

I tweeted last night about finally talking myself into making a go of a business idea I have been kicking around for a while. Here is the outline of it, I’m putting it out here for feedback and criticisim from my peers to find out if the idea has legs before taking it to the next stage of development

Geekspaces will be a new kind of bar and meeting venue designed to attract customers with a keen interest in Technology who need a casual space where they can eat, drink and use their laptops.

Find out more at the Geekspaces Website. If you like what you read, please take the time to complete the survey.

PCI DSS and some advice from the trenches

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:48:50 GMT

For a while now, my responsibilities at my work have revolved around the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). As of publishing this article, PCCL are compliant as a Level 1 Service Provider, the highest possible level of compliance.

Ruby played an important part in our overall compliance and I’m going to talk about how Rack and Sinatra play an important part in our compliance in a later post. For now I’ll explain a bit about PCI DSS itself and give some general advice for anyone working towards compliance.

First, I need to give a semi-obligatory disclaimer. I am not a PCI DSS QSA, all of what you’ll find here is based on my own experience as part of the two man team in PCCL who were responsible for designing and building our compliant infrastructure. From this, I’ve gained a good understanding of the specification; but you will need to speak to a QSA if you want advice which you can make business decisions on.

What follows is from my own experience at PCCL and the work undertaken for us to be compliant at this level to the PCI DSS Standard.

A 'Rescue Mission' is just a job, not a pump for your ePenis

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I get rather offended on behalf of other people’s customers when I hear friends and colleagues telling me about horrific ‘Rescue Mission’ projects they are involved with, how feeble and inferior the previous developers of the project were and how only through prodigious effort and liberal application of their own awesomeness, could they and only they, save the day / save the business that hired them.

Taking a step back from this and looking the pheomenon from the outside, you can draw some fairly reasonable assumptions:

The company doing the hiring has a mission-critical product that needs to be finished
Extra manpower is needed
External contractors are hired to help
The contractors help finish the product and it ships on time

This seems to me to be fairly common set of circumstances in the freelance world, at least from my own experience. Does that mean that every time I’ve worked in that situation I’ve been on a ‘Rescue Mission’? No, it means I was hired to do a job and did it.

My review of REWORK; surprisingly good book. Read it.

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:33:03 GMT

I’ll admit to have being a little bit hostile towards REWORK in the beginning; I avoided the book like the plague, thinking it was yet another attempt for someone to cash in on a reputation they (rightly or otherwise) have built for themselves.

I ended it up on my Nook only because I wanted to test the integration with the B&N Bookstore on the device.

I won’t say I feel I was entirely wrong with my initial opinion about the book, its a very good marketing ploy that promotes 37signals all the way through; however where I was wrong was in thinking that this book is not useful.

Once you get past the (rather expected) boastful, attitude filled writing style, you are left in no doubt that the book is written by knowledgeable people.

Live Blogging of the Scottish Ruby Conference 2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:48:56 GMT

The Scottish Ruby Conference comes to Edinburgh on the 26th and 27th of March, 2010.

Over the two main days of the conference, there will be three tracks with many, many interesting and informative talks from all corners of the Ruby world. Armed with my Netbook and a 3G connection just incase the WiFi goes; I’ll be there to bring you live coverage of the whole event.

I’ll be paying special attention to the questions and answers after each of the talks, and I’ll also be covering the lightning talks after the conference on the 26th. Hopefully those who can’t make it to the conference or the lightning talks will find it useful.

If you would like to join in with the livebloggery, then please drop me an e-mail and I can give you access to post too.

The liveblog from the conference will be visible from the Liveblogs section of this site and will make use of my Radiant CMS Liveblog Extension.

New Project: Prawn::Graph - Put some Graphs in your PDFs

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:51:15 GMT

Prawn is the fastest pure Ruby PDF generation library available. It really is pretty cool and takes most of the ouch out of generating print-ready documents.

I recently had the need to be able to generate report documents in PDF format, and found Prawn to be the best out of all the available Ruby tools to do the job.

The thing that was missing, however, was built-in support for adding graphs and charts to these reports I was generating. Of course, I could have used something like Gruff to generate a pretty PNG or JPEG of a graph and then embed that in the PDF; however to me this seemed inelegant and I was loath to add another bunch of dependencies to my application (Gruff, RMagick).

And so, I created Prawn::Graphs, It’s a very simple abstraction on top of prawn/graphics that draws Graphs. Find out more about it and see some usage examples on the project page.

The most nifty thing about this implementation is that it only relies on Prawn and the methods it exposes through prawn/graphics to do its work. That’s right, no RMagick, no embedded images, just native PDF graphs.