A little code, a little chaos, a little joy
I have been attending CodeStock 2014 here in Knoxville the last few days with a group of my software and quality assurance engineers. Several were even speakers this year! Thanks to the conference organizers for putting together another great conference this year! Continue reading “CodeStock 2014”
I will be speaking at the Agile Knoxville meeting on Aug 6th. See their website for details. The topic will be Distributed Scrum. It should be a good time.
Update
The Agile Knoxville session was really great. There was a good set of people. Thank you to everyone that attended, you all had good questions and feedback. And thank you to Adrian for forcing me to come speak. 🙂
I was invited to speak at the Agile Development Conference in November in Orlando. It was a great experience and I’m glad I agreed to do it. I have received some very positive feedback from some of the attendees at my talk.
My talk was entitled “Distributed Scrum: Dangerous Waters – Be Prepared”. See my talk page for more details about the conference and my talk.
Distributed Scrum: Dangerous Waters – Be Prepared
I want to extend my thanks to the conference organizers that invited me and for providing guidance. I also want to thank the members of Scripps Networks communications and marketing departments for their assistance with my presentation and for providing company swag to give out. Thank you!
Finally I also want to thank the people that showed up for my talk. Thank you for showing up! I hope you found something in my talk useful.
Sticky sessions are evil. Ok, I’ve said it. Actually I have said it before. In fact I am surprised at how often I have had to say it. They seem to get used with surprising frequency without properly thinking through the repercussions. I have been asked to explain the issues several times, so let me go walk through and document them. Continue reading “Sticky Sessions are Evil”
A fairly bizarre issue come up recently that I thought would be amusing to share. It all started fairly simply. One of the development teams needed to test some website changes that required overriding some of the website files without making changes to the website itself. This is not difficult for a developer to do, but they wanted to set it up more simply for a number of testers to use. I suggested setting up a proxy server and configure it to proxy most requests on to their normal location. Then send requests for the files they wanted to test on to the test location. We would only need it for a week or two during the test phase.
I had a little free time, so I decided to set it up for them. I considered setting up an apache instance using mod_proxy and mod_rewrite. I decided instead to write something custom in Node.js. It took me about an hour to write a custom proxy server and add rules to detect requests for the test files and rewrite the request before proxying it. I turned it on, tested by changing my local hosts file to direct website requests to my proxy server, and all was good. Continue reading “Bad Proxy”
A couple months ago my laptop got into an unbootable state after a software update. As annoying as that was, the timing was particularly problematic. I had documents that I urgently needed. I worked though the issue, but it made me rethink a few things. Namely my backups.
I did have backups, but not that covered the files I worked on the previous night. I had a desktop computer that I used for other reasons, and I wondered why I was not able to just bring my documents up there. This lead me to look into cloud backup offerings. It turns out that there are quite a few. Continue reading “SugarSync: Cloud Backup”
