software
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Value of an Incident Postmortem
May 18, 2022
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2 min read
One of the things I have come to believe in since working in a full stack type of role is the value of a postmortem. When something goes wrong, it is too easy to just fix it and move on to the next thing, without stopping to think what actually went wrong and how your reactions influenced the end result. This is bad because it can stop you from identifying weaknesses in your systems and preventing the issue from recurring.
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The Joy of Automating Deployments (again)
Apr 19, 2021
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1 min read
Previously on the topic of automating deployments I mentioned that we would “likely to be able to perform more regular releases” now we had a streamlined process. Well, it seems that we are indeed performing more regular deployments!
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A Year of Involuntary Home Working
Mar 18, 2021
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2 min read
Today marks a year to the day since the University I work for told the IT department to pack up and go home. Other staff had been sent home a few days earlier, but we had been kept on site while it was established things were working well. Once things were settled and management had decided on who needed to remain on site to support the various hardware bits that still need the odd prod, we all got the “bugger off home” email.
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The Joy of Automating Deployments
Mar 1, 2021
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5 min read
The team I am on at work has recently been on an automation spree. This has stemmed from a disasterous deployment a year ago where things we had tested were broken, things that hadn’t been tested had been deployed and we ultimately ended up rolling the deployment back. A large part of this experience was down to poor code/git hygeine on the part of some members of the development team. But it did hammer home that we needed to change how we were working.
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Getting Vagrant and Ansible working on Windows 10
Nov 1, 2020
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5 min read
One of the big things I have started using both at work and at home is Ansible. It is an automated deployment tool that makes it really easy to create reproducable builds. This means I have needed to figure out a way to test the playbooks I am using to deploy and upgrade servers. Enter Vagrant.
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Working from home during a pandemic
Sep 8, 2020
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2 min read
This year has been wild. Early on in the pandemic there were mutterings going around at work about sending us all home to work from there. Nobody was really expecting it to actually happen for a while - and then it did.