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Moving Blog

Moving blog to my own domain and server.

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Going to Velocity Conference 2011

It should be fun.  I just got off of a gig where the development team was responsible for a lot of the operations.  The dev-ops story is interesting.  There are too many walls between developers and operations.

I hope to learn a lot about monitoring and testing.  I'll probably stay away from the Javascript sessions even though I need to know more about it.

hg for ~

bitbucket is now offering free private repos for their mercurial DVCS.  I used to use github but paying $7 per month to store some modest source code and a few dot-files seemed too much.

Here's how I set up mercurial and bitbucket to manage my home directory configuration files.

Go to bitbucket.org and create a new project named 'home' or something.

kabar:~>hg clone http://bitbucket.org//home
kabar:~/home>cd home

kabar:~/home>mv .hg ..

kabar:~/home>cd ..

kabar:~>ls -a > .hgignore

kabar:~>hg add .vimrc
kabar:~>hg add .bashrc
kabar:~>hg status
A .bashrc
A .vimrc
kabar:~>hg commit -m 'initial checkin of dotfiles'
kabar:~>hg push
http authorization required
realm: Bitbucket.org HTTP
user:
password:
pushing to http://bitbucket.org//home
searching for changes
remote: adding changesets
remote: adding manifests
remote: adding file changes
remote: added 1 changesets with 2 changes to 2 files
remote: bb/acl: is allowed. accepted payload.

Then you probably want something like this in your ~/.hgrc

bitbucket.prefix = http://bitbucket.org//home
bitbucket.username =
bitbucket.password =
bitbucket.schemes=https

Book Review: Personal Efficiency Program

The book borrows from and is a sensible continuation of Getting Things Done.  If you're not familiar with GTD, read that book first.

The PEP book puts GTD more in the context of work.  There are some gems in the book but overall I'm not sure if it's a must read.  Pick it up if you're into GTD and you're looking for more help with organizing your work life.

What Kind of Guy Am I?

I was at a local user group the other night. I mentioned that I was going to do some management training to a colleague and he seemed surprised that I was getting out of the code. I'm glad he said that because it has made me more aware and reflective of my career and current situation.

In 2000 when we were using Perl, duct-tape, building jars from IDEs, Windows batch files, manual steps and bash files I decided to become the build and deployment guy introducing ant to a skeptical organization.

When I saw projects continually fail and stagnate I became the process guy. First we did what seemed right, then I read up on Scrum. I'll never go back to waterfall, not because I'm dogmatic but because I like to succeed.

When faced with mounds of green-field work in a domain I barely understood I became the requirements gathering and domain modeling guy.

Tasked with creating a scalable, flexible, testable system I became the architecture guy.

As the most senior person in a growing team and successful organization I'm slowly turning into the management guy. To most of my peers this is a stark transition. Committing to the dark side, never to return. I just don't see it that way. I'm filling the vacuum, solving problems, getting things done and kicking ass. I see it as operating from the same play-book I've had for over 10 years.

Got a Mac

This weekend I purchased a 15" Mac Book Pro. I've used Linux almost exclusively for the past 10 years. It came down to me needing a good laptop and dreading the thought of having unsupported hardware after spending a lot of money.

I evaluated laptops from 6 companies. They all had the hardware I wanted at a great price but none of them said anywhere (that I could find) about their Linux support. You figure among them they could have thrown in an Ubuntu CD and checked to see if their web-cam works etc...

So I'm diving into the Mac experience. The first piece of software I installed was VMWare Fusion and then I got an Ubntu VM fired up. I plan on getting that set up the way I want for development and then gradually dipping my toe into writing software within Mac OS.

So far I'm pleasantly surprised, it's a great machine.