juliansimpson.org

Win a copy of Atlassian Bamboo

2009-06-17T18:32:00.001+01:00

I'm running a give-away on my other blog. Atlassian are giving away a license for the Bamboo Continuous Integration server. There's also 10 Bamboo T-shirts up for grabs. Just write a few paragraphs about your best or worst build experiences ...

http://www.build-doctor.com/2009/06/16/atlassian-bamboo-giveaway

Play to your strengths

2009-02-16T22:42:00.002Z

This session at Agile 2007 was very interesting. Mainly because I learned about the Gallup organisation and their focus on playing to your strengths for success.

It's not a very PC message: just do what you're really, really good at, and don't put too much time into rounding off your skills. If you're a monster programmer, don't take a detour into project management. Just keep sharpening your claws.

Anyhow, I'm taking their advice. After spending a frustrating year trying to get a bunch of developers to write .NET software more repeatably, I'm playing to some of my strengths: Unix systems administration, Ruby scripting,and dicking around with open source apps.

My new role is at Enrich Social Productions. Among other things I'm in charge of production systems, which means I get to use Puppet. In a year's time I'd like to be doing most of my admin using TextMate.

Our first project is One Click To Fame, an online talent competition. Really enjoying digging into the guts of the site and understanding the dependencies.
It's also nice to work in media again.

2008, the headlines

2008-12-30T15:08:00.001Z

January: I left ThoughtWorks after almost 4 years. Mixed feelings.
February: I started my new job in the City.
April: Took a holiday in Scotland. Scotland is good.
June: Had vasectomy. My advice: take at least 3 days off to recover. That's all you need to know. Oh, and don't make small talk in the waiting room. Just bury your nose in the gadget magazines like everyone else.
July: Lesley started working again. I take the kids to school 2 mornings a week. Discover new meaning to being organised. Lovely to do, though.
August: fantastic holiday in France. Unless exchange rate moves it could be Bognor next year.
October: Did my one conference of the year - CITCON. Had to pay for it myself. Worth it.
December: Left my city job. More interesting things to do. More on that later.

Funny old year. Didn't ride my hybrid bike much (see June). Barely rode the little bike in London at all, unlike last year where I caught the tube about 5 times.

Next year will be new job, scary times and hopefully the chance to do more of what I want to do. Which is write and mess with Puppet.

Bring it on.

Farewell to the world of insurance

2008-12-23T10:33:00.001Z

No longer am I something in the City. I have mixed feelings about this. Insurance seemed to be a safer occupation to have in interesting times, and I liked wearing the suits. I liked the guys I sat with, and the business in general was very interesting.

Wasn't my bag though. I can do Microsoft work, falteringly. There's a time and place for that and I don't want to be a platform zealot. But my approach is very Unix-like. I'm all about the command line, even on Windows. That wasn't a perfect fit for me, and it probably wasn't for anybody else, either.

Anyway, I learned a lot and if I can safely convey some of those lessons on my other blog I will. I'm very shortly going to be doing some interesting things with a media startup and getting my hands on production again. Without a GUI tool in sight.

Balancing the books with your schedule

2008-12-18T16:44:00.001Z

I used to run my own business, fixing people's Macs and PC's. Invoices would be made in my office using a book keeping package on my Mac IIsi. Which was never where I was. Invoices would leave my corporate HQ in desperate bursts, rather than a steady flow.

If the accounting software would have supported it, I'd have used the shiny new Applescript (hey, it was 1996) to allow me to generate invoices from where I was, rather than when I got back to the industrial area where my corporate HQ was.

12 years later (and thanks to @timharding) I think I've found what I wanted. Freshbooks allows you to generate invoices and track expenses. You can buy postage credits and they will generate snail mail invoices. PDF invoices are free. If you have one or two customers, it's free.

I'm also reasonably happy with the expense tracking. It's not as good as something like Xpensr, but it works for me in the UK. Xpensr say that changing the default currency from US dollars is their most asked for feature, but it's not there yet. When they implement that I'd be very interested in using it - they lookup exchange rates at IMF rates, and automatically convert.

Blinksale was quite appealing for all this two years ago, but the competition is looking sharper all the time.

[N]Ant Refactoring

2008-12-09T23:25:00.001Z

I just started a new series on the Build Doctor: Ant Refactoring.

What? Oh okay. It'll work for NAnt as well, if any of you .NET guys are still using it.

The unofficial beer of the Ruby community

2008-12-09T19:07:00.001Z

I'm playing with Blogo's drag and drop and I'm liking it. I bought this Leffe Ruby in the supermarket on holiday. I think I'll stick to Brune.

Build Doctor: normal service has resumed

2008-11-24T15:00:00.003Z

In October, I made 3 posts to the blog. One of those was a guest post as well. Things have been busy. Far too busy. That's about to change, but I'll announce that soon.

In November however, I seemed to find my blogging mojo again. Here's some new projects:

The Build Rosetta Stone, a reference of build tool commands,
An RSS feed of Build and Deployment jobs in London,
An occasional comic
A series of posts around the CITCON CI Cage Fight. (build-o-matic, CruiseControl, Hudson)

Whew.

Child: why do we have firework displays?

2008-11-02T22:41:00.003Z

Me: Well, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up parliament and he didn't succeed so uh, we celebrate him not blowing it up by umm .... blowing things up ...

Happy Mac

2008-11-01T20:02:00.006Z

Success! Gigabyte of RAM in Fox, one of the mighty engines that drive The Build Doctor. It's an old G4 PPC based Mac. Most of the articles that I have written for the blog have crossed this little Mac's desktop. Fox only had half a gigabyte of RAM. That wasn't really enough to load the operating system and the applications. Camino (my main browser) itself was taking up hundreds of megabytes of RAM on it's own.

The one thing that stopped me from upgrading earlier was that damn case. You don't unscrew it, you prise the thing open with a palette knife. My palette knife is rusted to bits and wasn't going anywhere near Fox. After reading up on it, I ordered a plastic spatula from Amazon in the hope that I could use it to prise the lid open. No deal. It turned out that I had a plentiful supply of what I needed - table knives. Push the knife into the crack between the lid and the case, gently slide along to release the first clips, and then lever out. Repeat on three sides:

Once you have the lid loosened you can proceed with the upgrade. This guide was very helpful ( courtesy of @nasrat). Here's the machine with old ram out and new ram in:

The case doesn't seem to be scratched. Was it worth it? I think so. The UI is snappier and I can run iTunes, iPhoto and a browser. Which used to take some patience.

Thanks to @nasrat and @indietim who sent encouraging tweets.

New post on www.build-doctor.com: six tips for automated releases

2008-10-15T12:51:00.003+01:00

The cutover to WordPress is almost complete. There's a few broken Urls that I still need to redirect. Amazingly (and courtesy of my friends at YouDevise) there's a new post:

Link

Unmade road: 1 Dahon: nil

2008-10-13T21:36:00.006+01:00

I did get my money's worth out of my Dahon Mariner in 2 years. It won't be traveling all that far now, with the broken frame you can see if you look carefully at the photo.

You can conclude that it is indeed a road bike.

Today I did ride it to the train station, and then from Waterloo to the office. Because I forgot my lock. I took the scenic route along the South Bank and the Millennium Bridge.

Playground accident

2008-09-07T22:20:00.002+01:00

Today we went to an NCT event: two solid hours of field testing climbing frames. It's all good fun until someone gets hurt.

(No children were actually harmed in the making of this image, honest!)

blog retrospective

2008-09-03T21:22:00.003+01:00

I meant to do this at three months. Then at six. I kinda missed the boat at nine as well. Finally, here's the first of two or three posts on my how my other blog, Build Doctor is doing.

Link

I'm going to enjoy eating you, little chillies.

2008-07-26T11:28:00.003+01:00

We have about 8 chilli plants. All cultivated from seed, which I'm proud of. Some were bought in a packet, some were scooped out of a chilli that I was de-seeding to cook with.

Last night, I dreamt in code ...

2008-07-25T12:32:00.002+01:00

... and the code was Perl. It was slightly disturbing; it's not like I've written any Perl in years. What does it mean?

Debian on my eeepc makes me happy

2008-07-15T22:59:00.004+01:00

I ruined the Xandros install on my Asus Eeepc weeks ago. So I've just done my second Debian install on it, this time using an 8Gb SDHC card to host the OS. There's a tangible lag sometimes because the SD card is connected via USB2, but not enough to matter. Mostly I just write stuff using Vim, if I get a seat on the train.

Blimp over London

2008-07-14T22:36:00.003+01:00

Taken from London Bridge this afternoon. I'd write something funny but I burnt my finger cooking poppadoms.

Radiator construction at the Guardian - a guest post at www.build-doctor.com

2008-06-23T20:55:00.004+01:00

(click here to skip my introduction and go directly to the post)

The last project I did for ThoughtWorks was at Guardian News and Media, working on the redesign of their website. It should have been a dream project: I used to read the newspaper cover to cover, I'm really interested in media, and it's a chance to see what running one of the biggest websites in the UK is like. I was a bit shocked when I got there.

Like any software project, there were issues. The developers were doing their damnedest to meet some aggressive deadlines, the testers were writing automated tests like their lives depended on it, but something really wasn't gelling. It didn't seem to matter that the automated build that ran the functional tests was broken for days at a time. ThoughtWorkers the world over are capable of amazing amounts of discipline in software engineering. It felt like we weren't hitting that level and it wasn't clear why. What I did to try and fix this?

In the project room, there were 32 inch TV's on the walls to display the state of the website. It was just coincidence that the developers were housed next to the Guardian's excellent systems operations team. The developers had a Wi-Fi rabbit. It was no contest. Something had to be done. In the very first guest post on The Build Doctor, Michael Brunton-Spall picks up the story of how we built an Extreme Feedback Device called the Build Radiator.

Link

blog and job news ... the ThoughtWorks split is permanent

2008-06-15T22:32:00.007+01:00

(Causeway Coast, Ulster, 1993)

News:

My blog, the Build Doctor is no longer on the Planet TW aggregator. You can subscribe to the RSS feed, of course: Link
There's a new RSS feed for this blog. The old one redirects to this, but for what it's worth: Link
And I passed my 3 month probation at Beazley Furlonge. My new office digs are at Monument (ironically just over the road from the old TW offices); I'm really enjoying being back in the City. Do I miss my ThoughtWorks colleagues? Loads of them. Do I miss consulting for ThoughtWorks UK? Negative. I'm enjoying life.

The 20th Woking Bikeathon

2008-06-15T20:55:00.004+01:00

The Woking bikeathon starts at 10am sharp. Once the speeches had finished, we set off about 10:20. To be fair, they had Alastair Campbell, a past Mayor of Woking and a present Mayor of Woking and other dignitaries queueing up to have their speech.

This year the route took us through New Haw, along the M25 in a zigzag fashion, through Virginia Water past the Wentworth golf course, across the M3 and back in Woking via Chobham and Horsell before heading back to Sheerwater where the ride starts. This route came very close to our street, but we didn't give in to temptation and go home for cups of tea.

It felt a lot easier this year. I put it down to the bike. Last year I was riding a mountain bike with street tires; this year I actually bought a hybrid road bike. It makes all the difference in comfort and speed. This year also felt easier because it wasn't hosing with rain. 30 miles quickly vanished under our tyres. Fueled on doughnuts (apparently, the staple food of the bikeathon), we did our bit for Leukemia Research in about 3 hours. I think I'll try it towing a child next time.

To all those who sponsored and encouraged us: thank you. It means a lot.

Tim's latest project: shelter for writers

2008-06-15T10:25:00.007+01:00

My friend Tim is a London based Rails developer . He has given you such things as http://whenshouldwe.com and http://smarterfitter.com He just announced his latest site, Writer's Residence. In his own words:

Writer's Residence is a product specifically for writers who need to market themselves and their writing. It's a fast, easy way to create professional portfolio site including CV / clippings / samples / tear sheets / publication lists. It's designed for showing off work to commissioning editors or potential employers.

I really like the concept: allowing people to focus on promoting their writing and not piddling around with blog skins, etc. The site was born out the frustration of a real freelance writer trying to promote herself online.

Link

A precious moment

2008-06-01T22:39:00.002+01:00

Today, both my daughters were riding bikes, unaided. Lesley and I are over the moon about it.

We decided that it was time to get Emma a bike. After a visit to the fine Action Bikes in Woking, we learned that:

Abby, the older one was using a bike that was too small
The bike that Emma fancied in the shop was also too small.

We ended up buying Abby a new bike sans trainers, and putting the trainer wheels back on her old bike to give to Emma. It's rough being the youngest. There's an abandoned go-kart track near us in Woking that's now a park, so we went out there and let the kids loose. Emma went tearing off on her "new" bike. Abby had gained confidence after some false starts, and proceeded to demonstrate it by riding about 5 times around the track without stopping.

Both Lesley and myself knew that she had the cycling bug when she went around the track without stopping to talk to us. Now we need to get a cycle rack so we can all race around.

Two kids, each knocking off a rite of passage. Magic.

Last chance to sponsor us before the Woking bikeathon.

2008-05-08T22:42:00.002+01:00

Leukemia is horrid. Riding bikes is good. That's why we are riding in the 2008 Woking Bikeathon for Leukaemia Research. More info: Link

Scaling up CruiseControl ...

2008-04-21T18:22:00.002+01:00

... is my latest CruiseControl best practice post. In English and Chinese.