Archive
Git-Flow – Updates – Ideas
As some of you that follow me may have seen, I’ve been quiet in the last week. This is/was for good reason. I’ve been a bit busy doing quite a number of things including writing more articles, some of which are more around the grey areas in development like Architecture, Methodologies of Development, Design Practices and so on. I’ve also been busy trying to get my Code Project articles completed, which I’m hoping to publish very soon. It’s been a bit strange putting these together and even though I’m going to take a while to publish all of them, they did get me to read a lot about various things and they also got me thinking about things that I’ve always done and re-evaluating those principles that I have and that most of us developers like to talk about.
So, hopefully I’ll get those done and hopefully they will get people talking a bit and I may even have some of you challenge my thoughts on some of the concepts that I’ll put out there, even though there won’t be too many new things. The idea is to start having the discussions in an open platform where everyone is on the same foot and all the different paths can be explored in an honest manner. Anyway, I’m not going to go too much into it right now… 🙂 Just know that it will be coming in the next month or so and it should be interesting to hear what some of you say…
In the meanwhile I’ve just finished my article on Git-Flow called “Getting Started – Git-Flow” and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Git-Flow is a very interesting concept that builds on the powers that Git gives you, even though it can be implemented on just about any and every other Version Control System there is. So, if you were looking for a good Branching Strategy or a good process to implement for when your company/team is doing development, try it and give me some feedback to say where I can help you adopt it or where my explanations are lacking a bit.
In the meanwhile, I’m going to continue writing those other articles which will hopefully take me a bit more into the code and a bit less into the environmental things that makes our lives easier by giving business the visibility they need.
Have fun!!!! 🙂
Getting Started -Git
So, you may have heard about a thing called Git and you were wondering more or less what it is and whether you would be able to use it for your own projects. Of course it’s not something new to those that know about it and for those that have been doing some open-source work. For the rest of us who come from more of a Microsoft world or even a Java one where we use tools like Team Foundation Server and Subversion, I’m hoping that you’ll find my new article called “Getting Started – Git” a bit more helpful in explaining what this thing called Git is. Since learning about Git and using Git, I’ve slowly started switching my stuff over to Git and even though I found it to be a bit tough to get use to when starting, I’ve come to realize that the benefits of using it outweighs the benefits of using some other tools.
As you’ve probably seen on this site, I have quite a few articles pertaining to Environments and the tools you can use to work well on all projects. Well… This is another one of those tools. What you will also be seeing in the coming months is how I start bringing these toolsets into the world I’m use to called Microsoft. As I’ve mentioned in some of my other articles, I’ve been trying to finish some articles that I’m hoping to publish on Code Project, which of course I’ll also have hosted here. Most of those articles will be on code written in .Net and what I would like to do is take those articles and their code and also do them in Java and Ruby, which will then hopefully give some of you non-Ruby and Java developers wanting to come into this space a bit of an advantage on how to get into it faster. I hope you enjoy the article and I also hope that you find some of the stuff in there helpful and useful to get you to understand Git and how to use it. In a subsequent article I’ll be combining Git and Git-Flow to give you a branching strategy that makes life a whole lot easier.
Setup – Apache and Jenkins
So, there is now something called Jenkins in the world of Open Source Build Servers and it seems like it’s been around for a few months. Why is this remarkable? Well… Simply because Jenkins = Hudson. I was installing another server with Hudson today following the instructions in my article “Setup – Apache and Hudson” and only when I completed the install did I realise that Hudson is now actually called Jenkins. So, has anything changed? Nope, not really. Why did they decide to make this bold move? I can’t say, other than that there is some speculation that the guys over at Oracle wanted to start charging license fees for the use of Hudson and that the previously known Hudson guys then decided to for Hudson, rename it to Jenkins and to continue with the project in the old Open Source manner. Well, if this is true, then I am glad, because since I started using Hudson/Jenkins I haven’t looked back or had the urge to explore some of the other platforms out there. It simply works 🙂
To top it off, I obviously opted to uninstall Hudson and to install Jenkins and once that was done I thought that it might be a good idea to add/update another article to show you how to install the new Jenkins platform. You can find this article, called “Setup – Apache and Jenkins” here. I’m sure you’ll enjoy Jenkins as much as you’ve enjoyed Hudson and I’m also sure that we can expect to see this project grow in the coming months as we’ve seen it grow from the beginning. I wish them all the luck in their bold move and hope they continue to have fun 🙂 I know we will 🙂
Heads up though, I’m in the process of writing an article on how to use Jenkins as your Build Server runnig Continuous Integration for Ruby projects under Ruby Version Manager (RVM).
Related Articles
- Hudson becomes Jenkins (i-programmer.info)
- Hudson is dead, long live Jenkins (nighthacks.com)
- Hudson moves to Github (h-online.com)
Using – Ruby Version Manager (RVM)
I’ve just completed a new article called “Using – Ruby Version Manager RVM” which will be another article that I’ll refresh, change and update on a regular basis. Ruby Version Manager (RVM) is one of the best tools to use when you do Ruby Development seeing that it allows you to run multiple versions of Ruby and Gems together and to switch between these environments in an easy and straightforward way. The idea behind RVM is to have a sand-boxed environment that does not affect your system installs and can be dumped and recreated ad-hoc without having to worry that you’ll be breaking things on your system. By way of Gem Sets it also allows you to weave different Rubies together using different Gems. In all it’s an extremely powerful tool and in my upcoming article where I’ll be going into the use of Bundler and how you can use this powerful Gem with RVM, you should start seeing some of the more powerful management tools at work.
I’ve found RVM to be a life saver and can’t really imagine writing code in Ruby without it. When you start mixing in some of the other tools like Bundler, you’ll see how the power of Ruby and these tools come to life. I hope you enjoy it and that you learn something from the article and if you have feedback on the matter or if you would like me to explore certain point in more detail, please let me know.
Related Articles
- Ruby and some updates (yakiloo.com)
- How do I keep multiple Ruby projects separate? (rubylearning.com)
- Ubuntu, Ruby, RVM, Rails, and You (ryanbigg.com)
- Gem Bundler on Heroku (heroku.com)
GitHub – Getting Started
Even though I’ve been away from this site for a while (bad, really bad) I am coming back to it with some ideas and hope to continue the fun. So, for my come back, I’ve just published a “Getting Started” article under the Environments menu for getting into GitHub and I’ve also added a “Source Repository” menu item under the “About” menu that should take you to a place where I’ll hopefully be hosting some of the source of those articles that I’ve been promising for so long. I did some research on the various online repository hosting companies and must say that the solution that GitHub gives you is very comprehensive. So, I chose them as part of my “Ultimate Environments” range of tools I would recommend and that I will be using myself. Take into consideration that the entire range is still under construction and I will be refining, changing and adding more information as I continue. So, none of the articles on this site will at any stage be seen as complete, just like the code we write on a daily basis. In the real world, we only stop coding on a project when we start with a new one and if we start with a new one, we all know that we did the previous one wrong. I hope you like it and find it helpful and I look forward for any feedback and changes you may like.
Ruby and some updates
So, I’ve been quite busy learning some new things in the last couple of weeks which is why I haven’t been blogging or writing articles. Amongst the things that I’ve been busy with is writing some articles for Code Project which I’m hoping to publish in the next month or so. Some of the other things I’ve been busy with is playing with Ruby and the toolkits currently available in that space. Coming from a Java/C# background it’s been quite an experience jumping into the declarative dynamic world of Ruby and I must say that the more I play with it the more I’m starting to enjoy it. So, my setup is something like the article that you’ll be able to find on this site here. In the quest of learning more and more technologies and writing these articles I’ve come to appreciate the ability to slow down (in my private time) and to really think about what I’ve been doing and how all this newly found knowledge will affect my trend of thought and the way that I go forward in development and technology. As I state somewhere on this site, it’s all about using the right tool for the right job. Just because I’m a C# developer with a Java background doesn’t mean that those are always the right tools to get things done. Yes you may be able to do anything in your chosen technology, but does that allow you to really understand the problem you’re trying to solve or does it really make the Technology you use and the constraints it introduces your main focal point. As I’ve learned, the more you know, the less constrained you are by what you don’t know… Maybe ignorance is bliss and we should simply continue in the way that we always have, but then where’s the fun in that right? 🙂
Related Articles
- Digging into Ruby Symbols – O’Reilly Ruby
- Do You Understand Ruby’s Objects, Messages and Blocks?
- Ruby’s of Coney Island: ‘We Will Not Go Down Quietly’
- Ask HN: Rails or Django?
- Ruby Books
- Lucas Nussbaum: Helping improve Ruby on Debian and Ubuntu
- Obie Fernandez : Ruby on Rails and more…
- Why teach with Ruby?
- Mislav’s Explain Ruby
- Things That Newcomers to Ruby Should Know
MongoDB — Location Based Sharding, Global View of data
Image via Wikipedia
So here’s an interesting scenario which must have been solved by someone out there without having to write very complex routing code. How do you save your data to the closest data center while still having a global view i.e international customers should have a view of their data no matter where they or their data are and without affecting performance?
This is something that I’ll be exploring in the next few days and more specifically in a high transactional large data volume scenario… I’ll write-up an article on it when I have solutions. Maybe it can help someone out there 🙂 Maybe someone out there has a solution… Who knows 🙂
Some thoughts, ideas and fun!!! 