Mozilla has recently publicly opened up a new tool Observatory at observatory.mozilla.org. The tool aims to help developers and security professionals be aware of potential issues and help resolve them for a more safe and secure Internet. This will be a dive in to targetting our own website at revolvingcow.com and then listing the issues and how we resolved or justified them. The actual results can be viewed here.
So recently we got it in our heads to record our daily work for later review. The idea was to assess various points: How much actually coding is done? How much work other than laying down code is performed? How frequently are we interrupted? How do we respond to interruptions? Our findings Our experiment spanned 5 days and we recorded approximately 40 hours of video and audio. Some portions were not recorded because of sensitive data and/or logic but the sampling is still pretty decent.
The Inspiration About a month ago an article written by Mathew Garret, The Desktop and the Developer, was published which made some ripples throughout the community (or at least was referenced through various sites). Here is a summary of his observations: Majority of deployments of OpenStack (for what the conference he was attending was all about) are Linux-based The most popular laptop vendor at the conference appeared to be Apple Macs are aesthetically pleasing Developers don’t want to use different hardware and operating systems for work and pleasure The new generation of developers are more interested in the overall user experience And here were some of the revelations: Why migrate to Linux where at best they would have a comparable experience?
How this came about I had been spending a lot of time in environments where quick feedback on unit tests was normal and very well integrated. This wasn’t just the running of the unit tests and getting the normal pass or fail, but rather the tests ran in real time as things were being changed giving an immediate response. What really caught my attention was it was also providing code coverage and marking specific lines to show their level of coverage.
It is the end of the year and time for some internal assessments and reflections! This is an extremely high overview of our internal workings over the last year to give an idea where we currently stand. Overall things look pretty good since not all of the herd is full-time and all of our business has been acquired from word-of-mouth! Milestones Project Description Date Duration CHESS Consultant on the U.
What is the need? In some forms of development it is more beneficial to screen share than to limit the sharing to a terminal or just source code while pair programming. This is especially useful when programming on the Microsoft stack (specifically SharePoint development) where a lot of design and development is done outside of source controlled files. Here is a quick list of benefits: Allows machines to run in “headless” mode reducing computing load Enables easy sharing between remote team members Removes dependency of transferring virtual machines between servers Freedom to take more vacations as long as you have an internet connection Get the files If you currently do not virtualize your development we strongly urge you take an hour to investigate its worth.