Month: August 2016

Analyzing 2+ Million Travis Builds

TravisCI – a continuous integration service – shares some of the insights from over 2,000,000 builds they’ve run, in an blog post called “What We Learned about Continuous Integration from Analyzing 2+ Million Travis Builds“.  For me, the most valuable bit is about the reasons for failing builds, which clearly indicates the need for and the importance of unit, integration, and UI tests:

2016-07-28-analyzing-travis-builds-0

Around 20% of all builds fail.  There is a variation based on the language – for some programming languages, testing is part of the process and culture – for others it’s an acquired tool.  Once you do implement testing, most of your builds will run.  You’ll cancel very few.  But about 20% will fail due to failed unit tests, configurations, or environment setups.  Catching these 20% before it hits production is super important.

Pull Request focused dashboards for BitBucket

PR-focused-dashboard

A few days ago BitBucket announced the re-worked dashboards, which are now much more focused on the Pull Requests that you’ve created or need to review, rather than lists of repositories that you have access to.  I’ve enabled the feature for my team and it looks super awesome!

If you’ve been suffering from being lost in dozens or hundreds of projects and missing out on the Pull Requests activity, check them out.  You’d be surprised.

“I’ve never had a goal”

I found the blog post “I’ve never had a goal” over at Jason Kottke blog interesting.  There is a quote from Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamep (aka 37signals):

I can’t remember having a goal. An actual goal.

There are things I’ve wanted to do, but if I didn’t do them I’d be fine with that too. There are targets that would have been nice to hit, but if I didn’t hit them I wouldn’t look back and say I missed them.

I don’t aim for things that way.

I do things, I try things, I build things, I want to make progress, I want to make things better for me, my company, my family, my neighborhood, etc. But I’ve never set a goal. It’s just not how I approach things.

Also, Jason Kottke’s therapist advice:

For the longest time, I thought I was wrong to not have goals. Setting goals is the only way of achieving things, right? When I was criticizing my goalless approach to my therapist a few years ago, he looked at me and said, “It seems like you’ve done pretty well for yourself so far without worrying about goals. That’s just the way you are and it’s working for you. You don’t have to change.”

I myself don’t set goals either.  But I’m yet to reach that “you’ve done pretty well for yourself” part. Wink.

Torrentz.eu Mysteriously Disappears

Slashdot readers notice first that “Popular BitTorrent Search Engine Site Torrentz.eu Mysteriously Disappears“.

torrents.eu

Bummer!  This was my torrent search engine of choice … And this is just days after I’ve upgraded my Internet connection.

I’m sure there is a replacement out there, but habits are so difficult to change.  I still hope this is a temporary issue.