Comments for The Sober Build Engineer

Comment on Eulogy for a Founding Father by Bradley Baetz

Bradley Baetz — Thu, 16 May 2013 01:58:50 +0000

And there was extensibility even back then – emails (I assume?) for the results allowed red/amber/green lights to be triggered around some of the developer areas to show the current state of the build.

Comment on Eulogy for a Founding Father by Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:56:55 +0000

Thanks for giving Tinderbox a proper eulogy, it’s well-deserved as you explain.

Its architecture made it easy for me to set up a few build machines in first my student home and later my parents’ house on some kind of normal network connection and have them build SeaMonkey 1.x while reporting to the Mozilla Tinderbox server and making build and test results available to the public. And its architecture also made it possible for Mozilla to switch to buildbot internally and gradually while the same public-facing output stayed there. I’ll forever miss the public waterfall – the buildbot waterfall is not just much harder to handle, it also has no way of separation of active and passive tasks so you just cannot make it public right away and need to feed data through a different API to some public display.

Comment on Eulogy for a Founding Father by Matt Doar

Matt Doar — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:01:14 +0000

Yes, all the current set of tools were developed as a reaction to what existed: Tinderbox, Anthill, CruiseControl. As a profession we tend to neophilism which I think is a sign of a rapidly changing population of those involved. Or maybe those darn kids should just get off my lawn!

Comment on A Decade Ago by preed

preed — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:24:58 +0000

Hey Tim,

Thanks for your thoughts.

Yeah, there are few events like this, and like the one you describe that can prove to be so… well… sobering.

By the way, we’re wayyyyy overdue for coffee; I’ll ping you offline about that!

-p

Comment on A Decade Ago by Tim Cull

Tim Cull — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:23:40 +0000

I’m so sorry. My Dad has had heart surgery twice to replace valves. He made it through, but there was nothing like seeing him in recovery, before he woke up, to sober me to his mortality.

Comment on The Many Shades of “Fixed” by BIll

BIll — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:11:09 +0000

I know all about the done-done trick. At a former software engineering position, the expression was “done, but not finished.” Talk about double-speak!

Comment on DevOps Chat + Ship Show Happy Hour by ali

ali — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:03:39 +0000

If you settle the python v. ruby debate too early, please start in on vi v. emacs.

Comment on The Many Shades of “Fixed” by Tim Cull

Tim Cull — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:56:59 +0000

One of my clients had a CEO named Evelyn. She was really good at holding people’s feet to the fire and making sure things were “done-done”. In fact, she was so good at it that they didn’t even use the phrase “done-done”. Instead they called it “Evelyn done”

Comment on To The Victors Go The… by Jeff B

Jeff B — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 23:30:33 +0000

Databases is databases.

Comment on The Many Shades of “Fixed” by preed

preed — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 20:13:27 +0000

@Dean: I've been doing the footnotes so long, I don't believe the tag was consistently implemented when I started this blog. I do remember trying to use it, and some browsers would only display the first 100 characters or so; sometimes, my footnotes are longer. I actually have a tool that generates the footnotes, so I'll look into what it would take to modify it so there can be s and links; though, I'm not 100% sure where I'd put the link for the