My go at deploying to the cloud, EC2. It’s not *that* easy

I don’t have much server background, and probably its a lot easier to set up your servers with amazon EC2 than setting them up yourself or at other hosting solutions. I don’t care, it really annoys me that everybody claims how easy it is, showing you how to launch an instance in a minute. Yes, thats really easy, but you quit too abruptly. Nobody wants to set up an instance, then terminate it and lose everything you did on that instance. I say, never press terminate, you will lose every change from the last ami save. You are warned, be prepared or waste a lot of time.

Read on for links an tips for the whole cycle of launching, changing, saving and registering AMI. Everybody deploying to EC2 really have to do all this as a part of setting everything up, being prepared to launch more instances of the same kind.

Part 1. Deploying to experimental, :at => local

I’d like to share my workflow, as it has proven efficient for me. I’m running two ’servers’ locally (!). Hang on, I said it was efficient, even though it surely doesn’t sound like it. The workflow should gain teams of any sizes, in my opinion.

I am developing an app it in rails and it also exposes some RESTful web services,  with_feed :through => :third_party. The third parties aren’t necessarily third parties, as we develop these too, but they are external apps collecting and sending data to my app. Part 2 will cover the creation of dummy clients that send randomish data to the core app.

OK, I will share the script and procedure I did to have a running server locally alongside developing my app. I wanted to have the server running locally, being able to receive request to the web server, testing the app manually, fast. To distinguish this local server (say localhost:3001) from your development server (sat localhost:3000), I decided to name it experimental, for simplicity. This is my workflow cycle

1. developing, creating migrations and so on, running mongrel at localhost:3000
2. git commit -am “I commit small changes, often!”
3. back_to step 2 if more_should_be_done
4. relaunch experimental server at localhost:3001, continuously receiving WS requests.

git pull and git push is performed frequently as well, but not as frequent as the above.

Rails 2.3+ template for creating new projects

I’ve been working with ruby on rails for the last few months and it’s been lots of ups and downs to me. It’s a learning curve and you just have to stand tall through the first frustrating weeks cursing the magic behind that you don’t understand. At least for a hard core java, spring, hibernate developer like myself, spoiled with great IDE support, which ruby lacks (It’s improving, with RubyMine, which I’m using,  a “clone” of IntelliJ IDEA). But then it becomes better, a lot better!

Templates

Kind of what AppFuse was supposed to provide the java maven community (what’s happening with this? I like the initiative!), the template runner of rails (version 2.3+) is supposed to help you set up your project with useful libraries, as authentication, test frameworks etc. No need to talk to much about it, I’ve created one that you can see for yourself, http://github.com/oma/rails-templates !

Downloads of my burndown excel sheet have exceed 400

I’m proud to say that there have been over 400 downloads of the burndown and burnup graph excel sheet I published about a year ago. I didn’t clean up nor explain much, just threw it out there. Download the (unmodified) excel sheet here: http://blog.omaconsulting.no/BurnDown/burndown.xls

Here is the post I publish about a year ago 18th June 2008 http://olemortenamundsen.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/sharing-my-burndown-and-burnup-excel-sheet/

What disappoints me, is that I have received no feedback. NO FEEDBACK!? Why not?

Strategies for separating unit and integration tests, using Maven, Eclipse / IDEA, cobertura

What I have

• Maven2
• Eclipse/IntelliJ IDEA
• Fast tests (unit tests)
• Slow tests (integration tests)
• Test coverage maven plugin (Cobertura)

I wish to

• run my fast tests (unit tests) from my IDE
• run my slow test (integration tests) from my IDE and maven
• run them all before committing code.
• create test coverage reports combining unit and integration tests
• create test coverage reports from unit tests only

Is agile easy or hard, simple or complicated?

I’m giving a lightning talk Wednesday, 11.feb, on SW2009, Oslo. It’s on a day-track called “Future development processes in a post-agile world (Effective software development)”. What’s your thoughts about that title? Clever? Needed? Provoking? Sad? Happy?

My thought? – Are we even agile yet? I think we’re far away from post-agile, but it’s probably good for us to discuss the subject.

Anyways, my lightning talk title is “You have yet to have success with an agile project” (Du har til gode å ha suksess med gjennomføringen av et smidig prosjekt). Switch You with I and it’s partly true as well, because how do we measure success? Well, that’s a whole other discussion, all I know is that I felt we had a potential to do much better, given the resources and information available at the time.

The objective of my lightning talk is to affect the attitude I feel many people have towards agile. So, is agile easy or hard, simple or complicated?

Most agilists would claim “Agile is simple!”. Maybe they’re right, but herein lies the problem, I think. When we sell simple to the customer (and the developers for that sake!), we risk that he’ll take too lightly on the process. Perhaps key elements are forgotten or simply ignored? The customer plays a big part in both waterfall and agile, but in agile his role is very different. We need the customer (product owner) on-site, continuously providing feedback and steer the project in the desired direction according to the newer information obtained. Sounds feasible, and easy, but this person needs both domain knowledge and the executive rights to guide the projects. Who can spare such a vital person to a development project? It would certainly be an easier decision if the customer new the project would fail dramatically if not.

So, from now on, sell “Agile is hard, but you get the better product”. Then, maybe, agile will become easy ;)

The only good branch is a dead branch

edit: so kill them fast :)

Smidig2008 – smidig gjennomført

Smidig2008 was a conference about agile methodolog, as was Smidig2007. I participated in organizing them both and we repeated our success from last year, expanding from 300 to 450 participants. I’ll continue this in norwegian as this is the language spoken at the conference.

Smidig2008 gikk av stabelen 9. og 10. oktober i Oslo Kongresshus. Vi hadde lært masse fra fjoråret, og bytte av lokale samt bedre registreringsprosedyrer bidro til en smertefri gjennomføring. Foilene ligger nå ute! Senere kommer også videoene. Jeg skriver her litt om konferansen generelt og mine opplevelser.

Bamboo, sound, X10 and lamp control script

Code is included in this post! I’ve written a small ruby script for polling a bamboo server for (multiple) build results, playing sounds for success and failure. It even controls lava lamps connected to a AM12 power outlet through a CM11 controller using the X10 protocol. You may get these at framtidshuset. To send the signals through your serial port(yeah, I know! serial port) to your CM11 controller, you need a program that takes arguments like this ‘command A1 on’, where A1 is the lamp/AM12 code and ‘on’ is the opposite of ‘off’ :) I use windows and ActiveHome’s (HomeControl) x10com32.exe (ships with the CM11 if bought from Framtidshuset), and on Linux you would use the free ‘heyu’ program. I’ve used heyu before and promise you it works.

Bamboo must have the Rest API enabled, a property setting you find somewhere in the bamboo settings.

Tests deployed, viewable and runnable for end-users?

My god, eclipse have they’re tests publicly available for you and me to view, and run!

I stumbled across this blog in a hopeless hunt for good articles about FitNesse, test data exhaustion -duplication, -hard-coding and other dreadful things.

Yes, eclipse foundation has executable tests in production. You may view the testflow (and workflow) in the swim framework. Swim impresses me (see eclipse swim pdf). Seems a bit crazy at first, but they’ve got to be doing something right in their testing (and test process) when they can have such automatic tests running in production . See the test result for eclipses election of committers and be stunned!

I’m not the only one curios about this. Repeated, here’s the blog post that I stumbled upon, here

Hope I get to try it, things always tend to look better than they are…