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I wasn’t involved with last week’s release. Actually, I left work early to celebrate Swedish Christmas with my family. And the release went ahead without a hitch. Bliss. I believe that making a release is a core responsibility that should be shared by all members of the team. Anyone should be able to do it, [...]

Last week’s deployment was more complex than usual – we redeployed the entire system and migrated onto new hardware. Our goal, as usual, was to minimize or prevent downtime. There were a number of ways to go about the roll out, so at the start of the day we sat down and built a plan [...]

On Friday afternoon, we completed our migration from one tower server to three rack-mounted servers. This was a big move for us for a few reasons: We scaled out from a single server to a small cluster of fully load balanced web servers. This was something that we had been working on for a while [...]

This past week we ended up making two releases: one on Monday and the other late Thursday night. The Monday release was a carryover from the previous week finalizing new functionality for a very important demo on Tuesday. The Thursday release contained features for a newly connected client that was shown to them on Friday. [...]

Last week at the Agile Vancouver conference, my colleague Jeremy Goldstrom presented on the process that we use at our company to deploy new releases to production every week. Aside from being a good distillation of our team process, the session led to some interesting follow on discussion with others that were doing something similar. [...]

Several weeks ago I re-read Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming white book. It was in preparation for an Agile 101 course that I helped conduct for Agile Vancouver. This was my third time through the book and the first time reading through it in several years. Each time I revisit it, I find I get different [...]

Last week, I conducted a tutorial on Continuous Monitoring at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. The title of the session is Continuous Monitoring: Beyond Continuous Integration. Unfortunately, the track organizers changed the topic title on me twice and as a result I ended up with a number of attendees who had come to learn [...]

I’ll be talking about leveraging operations databases to bridge the gap between development and production at tomorrow night’s Agile Vancouver meeting at Sierra Systems. See you there.

While at DevTeach, I was interviewed by Scott Hanselman for his Hanselminutes Podcast. We started out talking about the history of the CruiseControl.NET project, but I opted to segue into discussing Continuous Monitoring. Continuous Monitoring focuses on providing continuous feedback to a team by leveraging visible dashboard displays to ambiently communicate information about the health [...]

Last week I was out in Toronto presenting at DevTeach. I gave 3 presentations: Database Migration in .NET (Sample Code) Recommended CI Practices Operations Database: Bridging the Gap between Development and Production Unfortunately I ended up attending relatively few of the sessions as I was pretty busy preparing the materials for my presentations. But what [...]