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Last week, I spoke at the Agile Vancouver monthly meeting on the subject of *surprise* Deploying to Production Every Week. Eugene was kind enough to video the talk; so if you’re interested in catching a replay, it’s available on Vimeo in five 20 minute segments. Here’s the first video as a teaser: Deploying to Production [...]

Yesterday we deployed 19 times to our test environment (about once for every 4 commits). We were busy making some final refinements to a new feature that we launched last night. We had most of the team working on this feature (Single Feature Release) and the rapid feedback of the regular deploys helped ensure that [...]

I arrived home last night after a quick whirlwind trip to India for the Codechef conference. With three tech talks in three cities in three days, it didn’t leave much time for sightseeing. But I did have a few days at the end in Bangalore to catch up with friends and former colleagues. Here are [...]

I’m a big fan of CSS – it keeps things looking consistent, it separates structure and design, and it keeps markup clean, simple and maintainable. The greatest strength and weakness of stylesheets is their scope. A large number of pages are typically styled by a single stylesheet. This is great for consistency and reuse, but [...]

Last week I delivered a presentation at the Vancouver Software Developer Network meetup on the relationship between risk and frequent releases. In the presentation I proposed that building the capability to release software frequently (daily or weekly) actually reduces risk and that concerns about frequent releases are founded on a localized understanding of risk. You [...]

We have just sent out the call for session proposals for the Agile Vancouver 2009 conference. I’m really excited about the great list of speakers that we already have confirmed to come to this year’s conference, including: Arlo Belshee Eric Evans Michael Feathers Martin Fowler Michael Hugos Michael Nygard Jeff Patton Mary Poppendieck Linda Rising [...]

I’ll be speaking this Thursday at DevTeach Vancouver about our experiences doing weekly production deployments. Some topics that I will cover: Creating a weekly release process Zero down-time deployment Continuous Monitoring 5 whys Automated deployment As I haven’t been doing .NET development in over a year, I feel like a bit of an impostor at [...]

At my company, we use a form of Continuous Monitoring: every time our system logs a warning or an error we immediately receive an email identifying the source and nature of the problem. This allows us to respond rapidly to problems as they arise and gives us good visibility into the health of our system. [...]

Last week, we were fortunate to have Eric Ries come out and spend some time talking with our team while he was here for the Agile Vancouver event. We had the chance to talk about 5 whys, split testing and other topics. I would have liked to spend a bit more time discussing continuous deployment, [...]

If you’re looking for some quick ways to improve the performance of your site, Steve Souder’s High Performance Web Sites is packed with great advice. You don’t even need to buy the book as most of the information is available through links from the Firefox YSlow plugin. We have been picking one rule every couple [...]