Just a quick note before your Friday happy hour get started: QuickRelease 0.14 has shipped. This release focuses on a request we’ve had from many people: more documentation and examples. 0.14 sports: Full epydoc-style documentation for QuickRelease (generated docs are available, so you don’t have to do it yourself) A example set of processes and Read More
Last week, Robert X. Cringely did a fascinating four-part series1,2,3,4 on IBM’s failing fortunes. It’s a great series of posts, and definitely worth your time, especially if you find you and your friends pondering the Old Guard’s tactical responses to current trends in our industry at cocktail parties5. Cringely references a quotation from an old Read More
Nathaniel Mott wrote an interesting piece on PandoDaily last week entitled Back-End Engineers Are the Unsung Heroes of the Tech Industry. He argues that “Designers and front-end developers get all the credit,” despite the fact that the rest of the engineers supporting that whiz-bang device consumers want also make important contributions and have serious impacts Read More
I finally had the chance to read the ars technica piece on Facebook’s release engineering team that’s been sitting in a tab since last week. Despite the article’s tone being a little… Charlie-in-Wonka’s-chocolate-factory-ish, it’s got a lot of interesting tidbits, and is worth the read. It’s especially interesting to see how Facebook’s unique engineering culture Read More
Just a quick announcement that the newest version of QuickRelease has shipped! (Lucky!) 0.13, most notably, has the following updates/improvements: Entries from your release configuration files can now be coerced by the ConfigSpec class into dictionaries; you can do this be defining an item in the configuration file with the syntax [key1 value1] [key2 value2] Read More
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