From the monthly archives:

September 2008

CruiseControl Best Practices: not just for java

September 25, 2008

(image taken from Dan4th’s photostream)

In the beginning, there were programmers. The programmers quickly discovered integration pain:
“Bob! You broke the payments module again!”
Eventually a couple of guys felt the integration pain, thought “forget that” and wrote CruiseControl. This was in the days of CVS, java 1.2, and XML being considered kind of avant-guarde.
Cruisecontrol has a [...]

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Do you want control or visibility?

September 24, 2008

(image via Annie Mole’s photostream)

“Enterprise” version control systems are all about … well … control. Teams that practise TDD and CI don’t need control so much because they have visibility. If you committed your changes to the wrong branch, the tests will fail. If someone checks in an unauthorised change to the [...]

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Branching: do it like this and nobody gets hurt

September 10, 2008

It’s a very simple pattern. Make a Continuous Integration build for the trunk and the release branches. Most projects don’t need anything more clever than this.

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Build and Release work in London, UK

September 8, 2008

I’ve been asked if I could suggest anybody for a couple of roles. As an experimental thing I thought I’d put them out there on the blog and see if that helps anybody. Completely open to feedback here. Would you like to see the occasional job ad? Hate the idea? [...]

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Build Doctor Retrospective Season: Traffic

September 3, 2008

I had no idea how the Internet was going to respond to my little niche blog. At first, it didn’t. Slowly things built up and a pattern emerged. My audience is mostly in the USA. Almost all the traffic in the week, barely any in the weekend, and most of it [...]

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How to make Vim and Perforce work together in three easy steps

September 2, 2008

(Vim logo from http://www.vim.org/)
Step 1: Make sure that the perforce client is in your path. Can you open a shell (or command prompt) and type ‘p4′? Do you get a help message from Perforce?
Step 2: Open the .vimrc file (on Windows, look for a _vimrc file) in your home directory. If you [...]

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