exortech.com

If you missed the chance to register for the Agile Vancouver Lean Event, Eric Ries has agreed to give a second talk while he’s in Vancouver. Eric will also be speaking at the Vancouver Ruby/Rails/Merb event at Workspace at 7pm on Monday April 20th.

Last week, we spent some time adding better timezone handling to the application – specifically, the ability to view data in the data source’s timezone rather than the user’s local timezone. Our application leverages Adobe Flex for charting and data visualization, and it’s sufficient to say that Flex’s timezone support is frankly lacking. Flex supports [...]

On April 21st, Agile Vancouver is hosting a mini-conference on Lean Software Development. We have organized a great trio of speakers: Corey Ladas – the leading proponent of applying kanban systems to software teams Katherine Radeka – an expert in the application in Lean principles to product development Eric Ries – former CTO of IMVU [...]

Last week, we needed to run a long-running migration as part of our weekly deployment. Our company deals with large volumes of time series data – the majority of which is managed through a single large table (we haven’t implemented data sharding yet). We needed to do some restructuring and reindexing of this table, which [...]

Last week I made some modifications to our database migration framework (Bering) to support zero-downtime database deployment. My introduction to zero-downtime database deployment comes from Michael Nygard’s excellent book, Release It!. Database migrations are one of the primary sources of planned outages during a system deployment. As we’re deploying to production every week, this is [...]

One key difference between building software products in Java versus .NET is the preponderance of open source libraries in the Java space. In .NET, most companies are content to go with a fully Microsoft stack and, after Microsoft’s anti-open source campaign of the mid-2000s, are wary of letting open source creeping into their code base. [...]

Ganglia Last week, we got Ganglia running in test and production. If you aren’t familiar with Ganglia or don’t have something like it monitoring your site then check it out. It is, frankly, amazing. Commonly deployed in the HPC space, Ganglia is used by many large, high-traffic sites to monitor their server farms. Ganglia, using [...]

This week’s release blog is brought to you by my colleague Cailie, who kindly agreed to be syndicated on my blog: Thanks for inviting me to your blog, Owen. I love your choice of wallpaper…. it’s groovy man. Before I begin – let me send a big congratulations to your Gramma on her 90th Birthday!!! [...]

Last week, I set up something that I have tried and failed to convince many operations managers to implement: getting all production configuration files and scripts under source control. I’m not sure if it is out of security concerns or a fear of contaminating the production environment with version control software or because revision control [...]

Three releases last week – at this rate I’ll need to rename this blog series. For the most part, the releases were a non-event. Quite quick and painless. One thing about releasing software in these small increments – frequent releases get easier, not harder. One thing that is constant about each release is change: change [...]