The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#1

Post by mxstbr » Sat, May 13, 2017, 1:28 PM UTC

The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat
colloq.io

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#2

Post by cpr » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC

Matches more or less what we do as a 4-man team.

I'm curious why they used appear.in instead of Slack's audio/video conferencing? The latter is too new?

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#3

Post by kingbirdy » Sat, May 13, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

The branch deploy sounds pretty interesting, I wish there was more detail on it than just a footnote

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#4

Post by badosu » Sat, May 13, 2017, 3:42 PM UTC

cpr wrote: post #2

Matches more or less what we do as a 4-man team. I'm curious why they used appear.in instead of Slack's audio/video conferencing? The latter is too new?

> It’s quite reliable and even offers screen sharing without any plugins on Firefox.

Since they bothered writing this, I guess the lack of support for Firefox.

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#5

Post by e1g » Sat, May 13, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

kingbirdy wrote: post #3

The branch deploy sounds pretty interesting, I wish there was more detail on it than just a footnote

We do the same - it was surprisingly simple to implement -

  - CircleCI listens across all GIT branches and injects $CIRCLE_BRANCH into ENV
  - A build step populates a vhost template to point "$CIRCLE_BRANCH.qa.bofh.com" to "/var/www/$CIRCLE_BRANCH/current"
  - Another build step creates "manifest.json" with $CIRCLE_BRANCH and $CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM
  - The vhost config and the manifest are added to the release tarball/Docker image
  - The tarball/image gets shipped to the staging server 
  - (we ship to S3/Docker, then pull because of security concerns. But can ship inside the build process)
  - In staging, a script reads manifest.json and moves content to /var/www/$CIRCLE_BRANCH/$CIRCLE_BRANCH
  - The provided nginx vhost is copied into a standard dir with other vhosts
  - A symlink of "/var/www/$CIRCLE_BRANCH/current" is forced to point to the fresh release
  - nginx -s reload && profit

You can use a wildcard SSL to cover subdomains or add a step to trigger LetsEncrypt certbot as required.

This method works equally well with Docker images - just requires an interim step to launch the container. In staging, we use a naming convention to launch on predictable ports for every app. First 2 numbers are app specific, second 3 numbers are build-specific. For example, "25$CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM" (where $CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM is just the last 3 numbers of the build).

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#6

Post by mminer » Sat, May 13, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

kingbirdy wrote: post #3

The branch deploy sounds pretty interesting, I wish there was more detail on it than just a footnote

In a previous job, I built (what sounds like) a similar system. From a web UI, coworkers would see a list of recent commits, from which they could fire up an instance of the web app on demand. This created a new Docker container running the server that they could navigate to. A unique port distinguished each instance. Git tags indicated particularly important commits, e.g. new features that required more extensive testing.

Docker worked great for this task, allowing instances to be created and destroyed quickly. In a fresh instance of the web app you could create new accounts and import data then throw away the container when you were finished or wanted a fresh start. It worked especially well for non-technical people to see the latest changes as soon as they were pushed.

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#7

Post by evadne » Sat, May 13, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

cpr wrote: post #2

Matches more or less what we do as a 4-man team. I'm curious why they used appear.in instead of Slack's audio/video conferencing? The latter is too new?

Slack’s audio/video conferencing feature sometimes double-connects an user and frequently connects without sending audio traffic either way.

My team has been using ScreenHero prior to Slack buying them out. ScreenHero also supports audio calls without screen-sharing, and its audio calls have not been problematic for us.

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#8

Post by hgdsraj » Sat, May 13, 2017, 4:36 PM UTC

Why don't you guys use pivotal tracker? Way better ticket management, integrates with github

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#9

Post by dbg31415 » Sat, May 13, 2017, 4:37 PM UTC

ZenHub is free for teams under 5 people. And it's great.

* ZenHub - Agile GitHub Project Management || https://www.zenhub.com/

Also I use a tool that keeps labels in sync across GitHub repos.

* github-label-sync || https://www.npmjs.com/package/github-label-sync

Harvest for time tracking.

* Simple Online Time Tracking Software - Harvest || https://www.getharvest.com/

Red Pen for annotations. (Does't integrate with anything and that pisses me off -- how freakin' hard would it be to build web hooks so it could tie into Slack?! But on the whole it's got an easy to use interface.)

* Red Pen || https://redpen.io/

While I like Slack a lot, one client I have uses Discord... and it's not bad.

* Discord - Free Voice and Text Chat for Gamers || https://discordapp.com/

Re: The Tools We Use To Stay Afloat

#10

Post by bdcravens » Sat, May 13, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

hgdsraj wrote: post #8

Why don't you guys use pivotal tracker? Way better ticket management, integrates with github

We've use Pivotal Tracker before, and it always felt challenging to have more than a basic description/discussion (maybe that's the point), but most tools like Jira, Github Issues, Trello, etc, facilitate a larger view.