I didn’t understand why one of the hiring managers on my staff had turned down the candidate.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Adding UI to the Docker Registry now running on the Synology.| DWF’s Journal
Thanks to Luke Winikates, the rest of the deploy is now automated.| DWF’s Journal
How to make a proto-Fortune-500 CEO the butt of a joke.| DWF’s Journal
Earn issue 7 by sleeving.| DWF’s Journal
Test-Driving HTML Templates - Martin Fowler tooted about this article which shares a model for writing HTML rendering tests, including examples in Go and Java. I’ve leaned away from view tests for years and I tend to be very wary of parameterized tests. But I think this is worth a read to digest the techniques and see if/how they are worth applying in my own work.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Codex Updates| dwf.bigpencil.net
I was “off” last week as I was at RailsConf 2024 in Detroit with several hundred other Rubyists on Rails. It was a fun and interesting time. I thought the program committee did an exceptional job this year with the technical topics and inspirational keynotes. Having a day that was just workshops and OSS project hacking was genius. I hope to see this continue at RubyConf and other conferences in the future.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Editor’s Note: I’m going to be in Detroit at RailsConf the week of May 6th. If you’re going to be there, let me know.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Now that we have a local container registry running on the Synology NAS, how do we use it? We want to push updated containerized app builds to this registry, as well as set up the Synology Container Manager for low-fuss deploys.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Well, my app is deployed and running. But after several months of continued development and maintenance, I’m not happy with how I deploy this app. The required manual steps in the Synology DSM UI have proven error prone. I often forget what the steps are and have to click around until it’s working. How might we improve deploying my containerized Rails app?| dwf.bigpencil.net
Welcome to week 2!| dwf.bigpencil.net
First, this is a newsletter experiment. My sourdough starter is long dead and my exercise routine is solid. So that means it’s time for an attempt at a newsletter. This experiment won’t have a subscription feature just yet. But if this gets some traction, I’ll move in that direction.| dwf.bigpencil.net
UPDATE: Some folks have started StoryTime, a forum to talk about the transition away from Pivotal Tracker. It’s free to join.| dwf.bigpencil.net
This is part II. Visit rest of this series to find out how we got here.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Following my last post, I was ready to deploy an early version of my Meal Planning/Recording Rails app. Given this is a small app, with really only two users, I didn’t feel it necessary to pay to deploy it to the cloud and to do the work needed to secure it for cloud hosting.| dwf.bigpencil.net
It was time to move my Meal Planning app from AirTable to a custom application. AirTable’s pricing for the size of the database wasn’t awful, but I’d moved past the free account limits. And there were some features I wanted to add that were hard with the basic AirTable features.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I got to talk to Tony and Jesse about my Pairing Journey. There is probably the most resonance with folks who worked at or with Pivotal/Labs, but I got to tell some fun stories. We talked about parallels between pairing and collaborative gaming - including a shout-out to the classic Infocom text adventures and the more recent Overcooked - and pairing stories from the real world that worked and didn’t. Then we wind up by talking to our former coworkers who are impacted by the Broadcom/VMware...| dwf.bigpencil.net
This article is a spiritual Part II to the post The Team is the Agent of Work.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Once, a VP walked into my boss’s office and said that I needed to be fired.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I spent the better part of 18 months getting really good at using Obsidian. Enough that I wrote a whole blog series about it! Daily Journaling, general knowledge dumping, and longer-form writing became very natural.| dwf.bigpencil.net
The first time I was on a modern Release Engineering team, I was skeptical. I had worked with, and managed, “build” or “installer” teams. They often felt slow - a relic of the years of shrink-wrapped software. Why did we need them for a web-downloadable or web-deployable product?| dwf.bigpencil.net
I continued to trim around the ears of this blog since last week. And a few things stood out that I felt worth sharing.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I spent the summer of 1990 in Europe, mostly in Leicester, England, taking classes at what is now DeMontfort University. That meant a summer drinking a lot of beer - English beer, mostly Leicester’s Everard’s Old Original because, hey, Drink Local!| dwf.bigpencil.net
I thought some would be interested in my blog “refresh” story. It’s got several yaks that needed everything from a light trim to a buzz-cut/rogaine special. Like any good technical project rathole, I started with a dependency update…| dwf.bigpencil.net
Way back in 2013 I got a last minute request from Sarah Mei for a 10 minute talk during the Golden Gate Ruby Conference’s “Story time.” IIRC, it was meant to be a “break time” talk. Something light and fun so that the attendee’s brains could catch up a bit between deep technical sessions.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Kent Beck’s “3X” model is an interesting way to think about software work over the life of a product. Read the article and watch this video for a catch-up.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I wrote this originally in 2013, and it’s been hosted on the Pivotal Labs, then Pivotal Software, and now VMware Tanzu blog ever since. But I wanted to keep a copy of it around. So here you go, with some light editing.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I wrote an article a few months ago about how I was using Obsidian to take copious notes during my job search. It covers research into companies, connections in my network, and keeps true to Obsidian daily notes patterns. I’ve kept up the practice and it has served me well. But I found a small tweak I wanted to share.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I stepped in it (again) on Dev Twitter, jumping into a discussion about management on agile teams. I saw this thread from @allenholub that had an interesting reply from @alexbunardzic:| dwf.bigpencil.net
The internet had a bit of a buzz about Nat Bennett’s thoughtful post on their pairing experience. I think they did a great job talking about the personal impact of the pros and the cons of how we practiced pair programming at Pivotal.| dwf.bigpencil.net
My friends have been great about asking me how my current job search is going. Twice in the last month, people have asked a follow-up, “How are you tackling the problem?”| dwf.bigpencil.net
When I was a big nvALT user, I got very used to a specific set of actions whenever I needed to take notes on something I would…| dwf.bigpencil.net
Whenever someone asks me about the bigpencil.net domain, I get to tell this story.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Obsidian’s URL scheme is fabulous. A link of this form:| dwf.bigpencil.net
I have several regular meetings with a handful of people. These meetings are often peer-to-peer or manager-to-person type meetings. Here is how I use Obsidian to take notes during these meetings.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Don't Sleep on the Command Palette | dwf.bigpencil.net
This plug-in works with the Daily Notes plug-in. It adds a new tab in the right pane that gives a single-month view. Each date links to that day’s daily note, with a cute dot notation for the length of that note. You can also browse back and forth between months.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I keep nearly all of my notes in one Obsidian vault. I’ve found that cross-linking and my daily journaling have benefited the most from keeping everything in one directory and thus vault.| dwf.bigpencil.net
For internal links, I use the [[wiki links]] style. This is the default option and I find it’s just faster when I’m typing and am pretty sure there’s a note I want to link to. And if I’m wrong, it’s one click to make that note.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I am not a huge tag user. I find the search very good and the Linked/Unlinked mentions tab enlightening.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I enabled the Core plugin for Templates. This allows you to specify a directory of templates - just Markdown files - for when you create new notes.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I use the Core Daily Journal plugin every day.| dwf.bigpencil.net
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You have read The CD Test and it resonates with you. Continuous Delivery sounds great as a concept. Your team is doing some of these practices, but not all. Your list of questions with “no” answers sounds like a good to do list. You know that changing how the team works could improve the team’s momentum. That means shipping new features to your customers more often. And that means increasing business value of your product smoothly and steadily.| dwf.bigpencil.net
From the “Can you pronounce my name” game/meme from Twitter early fall, 2020. I love this one. —dwf| dwf.bigpencil.net
The spice must flow…| dwf.bigpencil.net
Originally published as a tweetstorm, I expanded this one a little to make it more blog-worthy.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Your software development team has a daily standup meeting. How’s that going?| dwf.bigpencil.net
A tweetstorm I wrote up in September, 2020, from being at a very early Foo Fighters’ show. I’ve migrated this away from being embedded tweets because Twitter/X. I’ve kept it linked for history’s sake. Refreshed with links and some text formatting. –dwf| dwf.bigpencil.net
I originally published this on Medium in 2018. I’ve made a few copy edits, but the content and intent is the same. | dwf.bigpencil.net
Originally written as a tweetstorm after Chris Cornell’s suicide. I’ve expanded a bit more here.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Originally written as a tweetstorm on the death of Jonathan Demme. I’ve expanded a bit more here.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Originally published at Medium. But really originally published on Palm’s Outlook server in 2006.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Originally written (and posted to Medium) for a friend who while around software for a while, and seen some agile teams, he was just starting to manage one directly. So I wrote up this bit of a braindump.| dwf.bigpencil.net
I have a set of Bose QC2 noise-canceling headphones that I use every day. I bought them in late 2007. They don’t make my BART commute quiet, but they make it tolerable enough that I can listen to music and podcasts.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Back to Work’s episode Little Velvet Hands was in my head the other day, so I used it in a teachable moment with my son.| dwf.bigpencil.net
Some years ago, during a particularly complex client engagement, we got thrown a curveball. The team was about 10 developers, cranking on a greenfield project. We were a few months in and despite a rocky start, were feeling pretty productive. CI stayed green, we had code in Production, and we were iterating quickly. Then came a random stakeholder request.| dwf.bigpencil.net