The NDC 2015 in Oslo was once more a blast. Two days of pre-conference workshops followed by 3 days of a content-packed conference with up to 10 parallel tracks resulted in an incredible learning opportunity. This year more than 1'900 attendees from over 50 countries attended a well-organized conference and turned it in a great event.
Visual Studio Online is a great service for developers. Not only do you get a whole Team Foundation Server for free, you also get a place to host your private Git repositories. As long as you use Visual Studio everything works as expected. However, that changes in the moment you try to use any other client (including GitHub for Windows). All you get with those clients is an authentication failure.
I use the service of Travis-CI now for a year. In that time the continuous integration has often pointed out problems I never had on my machine and let me quickly fix them, while I still know what the last change was about. If you don’t already use a service like Travis-CI you definitely should go and activate it. Here are 5 points on why this is a good decision.
Last week I was at the Soft-Shake conference in Geneva to speak about Xanpan and Metrics Based Decisions. This year’s conference was a little bit smaller than the last one, but it could still offer 8 parallel tracks on both days. Being back was nice experience and made all a bit simpler.
This year's NDC Oslo was once more a remarkable conference. Great speakers doing 9 parallel tracks for 3 days crated an enormous amount of content. So far I can give you an overview on the sessions I attended. It will take me some time to catch up on all the other sessions I want to watch. Those sessions will be part of another post in a few weeks.
The videos of the NDC can be found on Vimeo. I can highly recommend the presentations I mention in this post. With many more to watch I'm happy for any recommendations.
Dogfooding, as in use your own software, is a great way to find the pain points in your product. When you build a project management tool you could track its progress within that tool. If you are annoyed to insert the same values over and over again so might be your users. To improve this small part not only makes your life easier, but also helps the other users.
One of the main purposes of continuous integration is to know when your build fails. As soon as a problem is detected you want to be alarmed. But in certain situations you can accept a failed build. Today I will show you how to use a build matrix in Travis CI to allow failures for certain builds – without causing the entire build to be shown as failed.
As experience shows the quality of code degrades slowly and before you know it will be an unmaintainable mess. To prevent this many practices where developed and have proven their usefulness over and over again: test automation, continuous integration and code analysis are just a few of them. Unfortunately those practices still require work and just using them will not automatically keep your project on the happy path. Never less if you don't apply them your chances are even worse.
Refactoring is a technique I often use but know I still have a lot to learn, especially when I see a presentation like Therapeutic Refactoring. So I was very excited when the organizers of the Barcelona Ruby Conference announced the pre-conference workshop "Refactoring Rails Applications" by JumpstartLab. It may sound strange to attend a refactoring workshop in such a beautiful city like Barcelona, but you should give it a try.