My first experience with release engineering was almost fifteen years ago: I did a stint with Netscape’s release engineering team for a summer. I know I didn’t quite get why at the time, but I was hooked immediately. My professional focus has been on build/release engineering ever since. At various times, it’s been a difficult Read More
Launching a 350+-ton peice of metal-loaded-with-people-and-cargo is a bit of a technical feat, not entirely unlike shipping any reasonably complex piece of software. Boeing 737 airspeed indicatorsection of theprimary flight display That’s why those doing it day in and day out focus so much on procedures designed to increase the odds of repeatably successful Read More
A colleague recently recommended Robert Glass’ The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering1. Having recently finished Isaacson’s Jobs bio (finally!), I was able to start it today. The forward2 launches the book with a bang: The software industry is in the same state of affairs that the pharmaceutical industry was in during the late nineteenth Read More
One of my favorite tech writers, @rands, recently wrote up a year in review, and it inspired me to spend some time thinking about 2011 myself. One goal for the year was to write more consistently about release engineering, my experiences, and its evolving role in software development. I certainly did write more, and I’m Read More
Just a quick (pun intended) heads up for QuickRelease followers/users: 0.12 just shipped today! You can grab an automatically-generated tarball, courtesy of github, here. The 0.12 release has a bunch of minor fixes and polishes to the 0.11.1 release. Notable improvements include: Finish up a wholesale refactor of “Partner steps”: partner steps were originally created Read More
Last week, I wrote about a tool I conjured up to help describe the various positions organizations have their build teams in: Preed’s Build Team Spectrum. I wanted to talk a bit more about the X-axis. (I’ll leave the Y-axis for another post.) The biggest source of problems (and it was precisely this that caused Read More
Editor’s note: original post was split into two parts; part II will get published on Monday. I was catching up with an old college-buddy of mine, Brad1, recently and we started swapping work stories. Since he’s a software engineer, we (predictably) stumbled onto the topic of build engineering. He was frustrated at work: the build Read More
Songbird’s build farm recently moved nests. This I know because an ex-coworker recently asked for some random configuration details and any gotchas to look out for, in preparation for the migration1. After we finished discussing “bidness,” I wondered aloud how the farm had fared, post-Preed as the shepherd. His answer surprised me: it had been Read More
I recently read FastCompany’s interview with John Lilly. I knew John from my time at Mozilla1, so it was interesting to hear him talk about the developments after my tenure at the Corporation. One thing he said stood out to me: [W]hen I was at Mozilla the activity I did mostly was to tell the Read More
I wasn’t going to even bother saying anything, but raccettura’s post goaded me into it. Let’s put this in some perspective:Apple—user experience and design queen Apple—is to the rightof Mozilla’s position on this issue! Allow me to succinctly cut through all the cacophony on this: version numbers matter1. They’ve always mattered. And they will continue Read More