How We Make Trello • Hacker News Board

Re: How We Make Trello

#11

Post by edwinnathaniel » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:49 PM UTC

I'm more interested to know the actual technical details of the build and testing process than the "Task-List" software development based approach because that can be done by any software project management tools (even JIRA).

What's missing in this article is the whole Continuous Delivery technical aspect of it.

What do you guys use to build the NodeJS app?

What do you guys use to test the NodeJS app?

What do you guys use to check the code coverage of the NodeJS app?

What do you guys use to test the front-end?

What is the automated testing strategy?

How do you store artifacts of builds, schema migration (if using RDBMS) or handle different model versions, how do you rollback (what's the rollback strategy)?

Re: How We Make Trello

#12

Post by smacktoward » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:49 PM UTC

badman_ting wrote: post #4

It's almost comical how nobody at my company would ever take a project this seriously. Good for them, Trello is awesome.

Everything I've ever heard about Fog Creek indicates that they take their people seriously. Which probably makes them more likely to take their work at Fog Creek seriously.

Funny how that works, huh? A lesson many, many other companies could profit from.

Re: How We Make Trello

#13

Post by mbesto » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #12

badman_ting wrote: post #4

It's almost comical how nobody at my company would ever take a project this seriously. Good for them, Trello is awesome.

Everything I've ever heard about Fog Creek indicates that they take their people seriously. Which probably makes them more likely to take their work at Fog Creek seriously. Funny how that works, huh? A lesson many, many other companies could profit from.

I agree with your point, but it requires that you hire correct right from the beginning. Spolsky (like pg, Atwood, Fried/DHH , etc.) has his pick of the litter because of well thought out essays and large base of followers. You can't simply take this attitude without having a large pipeline of people who (1) agree with you and (2) who are good.

Lesson learned - creating a community or following of people (i.e. talent marketing) is a very powerful thing.

Re: How We Make Trello

#14

Post by sidcool » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

So they create a new branch for each fix? And all developers are supposed to merge in their branch every few hours or so? Isn't it a bit of a drag?

Re: How We Make Trello

#15

Post by icebraining » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:57 PM UTC

gomox wrote: post #7

mikegioia wrote: post #6

Does anyone know how the server determines which channel the client should be using? Are they doing this check at the apache/nginx level, or on the server right after the user is authenticated, and before the client code is sent?

Good question, I wondered about this as well. Channel switching would certainly create issues on data model changes in the underlying store.

From what I understood, the API doesn't have channels, so the store only stores a single data model. The channels are only for the clients.

Re: How We Make Trello

#16

Post by odonnellryan » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 4:59 PM UTC

sidcool wrote: post #14

So they create a new branch for each fix? And all developers are supposed to merge in their branch every few hours or so? Isn't it a bit of a drag?

I love to hear about workflows, what's your ideal one?

Re: How We Make Trello

#17

Post by dodger » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

sidcool wrote: post #14

So they create a new branch for each fix? And all developers are supposed to merge in their branch every few hours or so? Isn't it a bit of a drag?

Yes, more or less a new branch for each fix. But with git and Kiln, it's really not a drag at all; the merges are generally really easy and mostly performed by our release manager when the card makes it to 'Ready to Merge'.

Re: How We Make Trello

#18

Post by tel » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 5:01 PM UTC

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #11

I'm more interested to know the actual technical details of the build and testing process than the "Task-List" software development based approach because that can be done by any software project management tools (even JIRA). What's missing in this article is the whole Continuous Delivery technical aspect of it. What do you guys use to build the NodeJS app? What do you guys use to test the NodeJS app? What do you guy…

Is it actually NodeJS even?

Re: How We Make Trello

#19

Post by dangoor » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

sidcool wrote: post #14

So they create a new branch for each fix? And all developers are supposed to merge in their branch every few hours or so? Isn't it a bit of a drag?

That's how we work on Brackets[1], and I think a lot of projects work that way. It depends what kind of version control system you use. It's pretty easy to do this with the "GitHub flow".

[1]: https://github.com/adobe/brackets

Re: How We Make Trello

#20

Post by bobbygrace » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #11

I'm more interested to know the actual technical details of the build and testing process than the "Task-List" software development based approach because that can be done by any software project management tools (even JIRA). What's missing in this article is the whole Continuous Delivery technical aspect of it. What do you guys use to build the NodeJS app? What do you guys use to test the NodeJS app? What do you guy…

I hope Doug writes a more technical post about the multi-client build/release process. We have unit tests for the whole API and very few automated tests for the front-end. Client builds are stored in S3. We use mongoDB and will do backfills if necessary (pretty rare). Rolling back the client is just pointing the stable branch to another build.