Archive for February, 2015

One of my goals in spinning up a software development team at Foxguard has been to have a development environment ready to go before the first person comes through the door.  That means a vague skeleton of the application we are developing as well as the apparatus of building, deploying, and testing that application.  Since anything worth doing is worth doing right we’re approaching the latter problem with a Continuous Deployment solution in mind.  That means that every time we commit code it is picked up by a automated script, built, tested, and published — ready to begin evaluation through some as-yet-to-be-determined test suite.

The first part of this is fairly easy.  Jenkins is a great tool and there is no shortage of tutorials out there on how to make it play nicely with GitHub, MSBuild, or any other technologies you might be using.

Deployment, though, is a bit of an more difficult nut to crack. (more…)

Thus is the danger of over-automating your life.  I long-ago configured Unroll.me to bundle up messages from my hosting provider as well as several of the services and plugins I use on this site.  I check Unroll.me messages…. occasionally, but not often.  As a result, I missed several notifications: that my account with a spam-comment filter service had lapsed, that my site was being moved into a suspended state by my hosting provider for excessive spam comments, and the replies to my inquiries to that some hosting provider about what happened to my site.

Mea Culpa.

So now we’re back up and running with a new and improved spam filter.