Simon MalesAs an Engineer, the insights from the 37signals Rework book resonate deeply and seem quite obvious. Over the years similar ideas have being preached by myself and other Engineers, although the messages never seems to stick with management. 37signals, being a successful company, have published their own ideas so that they can stick. The book [...]
Here at the Hive anyone can host an informal workshop, known as a brown bag, to share learning’s which the team would benefit from or find interesting. This week I shared my experience about the Migrations Plugin for CakePHP. During GovHack 2012, we had three developer’s actively expanding the Bako schema and the Migrations Plugin provided [...]
This past, very wet, weekend a small contingent of Pollenizer’s participated in the volunteer run GovHack 2012. Armed with government published data, we set our sights on providing a forum for residents to contact their local representative. After two days of development Bako was produced; Connecting Locals with Local Representatives. Residents post video questions and [...]
Depending on the audience, I may describe myself as one of the following: engineer, developer, programmer or coder. Anyone who wears the above hats will wrangle with instructions that a computer somewhere will know what to do with. These instructions, represented in programming code, may be performed by multiple machines and an incomprehensive amount of [...]
A common problem the engineering team is experiencing at Pollenizer is finding the resources to dedicate to system administration duties. With the vision of reducing those duties, Pollenizer has been exploring PaaS providers. I have reviewed services offered by Orchestra, PHP Fog and Pagoda Box. The stand out is clearly the latter. PaaS providers typically [...]
Fearing change is normal and it is also a valid emotion. Within system administration, change appears in the form of upgrading. Upgrading is often closely followed by breaking. Deploying a bleeding edge Ubuntu distribution with only 18 months until End of Life can be daunting. Why bother? Trying to source new packages for an ancient [...]
