Oh and if you haven't read any Douglas Adams "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is fantastic
We were working on a fairly large new system and I had an idea about how I wanted to do something. We discussed the pros and cons and afterwards he sat down and said to me "If you do it like this you'll have problems when you want to refactor it in the future, but if you want to do it that way go ahead". I went ahead and did it my way, he was exactly right and I learnt a very valuable lesson in application design, architecture, and how to lead people in the future.
I like to think that now in all the teams I lead that failure is always an option.
`rerun --background -- "foreman start"`
It is super simple and works well for us
You can then add it as a simple href to the readme.md.
It also means that you can have multiple templates depending on what a user wants to do, just by having multiple links and changing the content of the `body` parameter.
Simplest way to get going on this is to use http://urldecode.org to write the markdown you want and then hit the encode button, take the result and add it after `body=`
We also use it to auto-assign labels using `labels=` in the URL
As a software dev I'd love to get my raw data out just to see what fun an interesting things I could do/see with it. When I have asked in the past they have turned me down flat saying that they don't provide access to the raw data because people could "figure out how we calculate our raw data and algorithms, so this data is all proprietary"
The most notable difference in terms of quality that I have personally noticed is that the geocoding on the OSM side of things is of wildly variable. The Cloudmade v1 Geocoding API was simpler and returned better results that the Cloudmade v2 API, but the data returned in v1 had less detail that the data returned in v2.
Mapquest offer a licensed data geocode and an open data geocode. The licensed data geocode, as you would expect, returns better results than the open data geocode but still fell short of both the ease of use and accuracy of the v1 Cloudmade geocode.
The kicker in all of this is that Cloudmade recently changed the way they choose to do business. That meant that my internal application wouldn't generate enough hits to the the Cloudmade servers to continue to keep the account open. We were literally in a situation of wanting to throw a small chunk of money at Cloudmade but because we couldn't meet a seemingly arbitrary lower limit we couldn't, abandoned Cloudmade and moved everything across to Mapquest.
Also I'd just like to call out that Leaflet.js is a fantastic library to use and allows us to do everything we want to do to the maps with an absolute minimum of fuss. We are looking at adding internal floor plans to some of the maps and I managed to throw together a PoC in leaflet.js that is looking like it would easily support this with a minimum of fuss.
That said I cannot imagine even the most incompetent team making a change to the status page, which I would always host on completely separate infrastructure, at the same time as the rest of production infrastructure.
Currently I'm going a centralised logstash server and using a logstash shipper on each of my servers to push the exceptions, from a standard logfile to it. I was toying with the idea of pushing all my errors at source to an SQL database but figured if I was having database problems I'd be missing all the exceptions that I could be using to trigger the alerts that I'm having database problems!
Doing this I found that the entire interface was much more responsive.
That said more technical details would be awesome - I'd love to see how other people are doing things like this!
After a full afternoon of fighting the change management process at my current employer, for what will be about 20 seconds of unavailability to an internal CMS server, it has left me wondering what do other people do for change management?If your employer/company has a change management process do you find yourself fighting it or do you find it frees you from the responsibility of the change?
I often wonder why open-source can't provide a good and cheap solution to this NHS IT problem. I know I'd happily work on something that will benefit the health of the entire population. I don't find it too hard to imagine that there are lots of other developers out there who feel the same way I do.
I was asked recently why I always choose to come to work dressed smartly and my answer? "Look smart, think smart"