Porting Jenkins logs to Newrelic

Greetings, world. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s not as though I haven’t had interesting technical problems to blog about in the past few years, only that my previous job had kept me so busy I didn’t have the time or energy to write up the problems I solved. But as of last December I started another new job, and I now have the time I need to really reflect and write up the things I’m learning. Continue reading

Dockerization Part 3: Deploybot

One of the key components to making a good integration between products is understanding the mental model of each product. What one product calls a “counter” another could call a “metric” or a “stat”, for example; or worse, one product could be reporting, say, the amount of free memory, while another is reporting the percentage. The same goes for integration points between teams. When I built our previous release pipeline, I discovered very quickly that while developers were comfortable talking about repositories, operations thought in terms of applications, and neither knew nor cared how many moving parts went into a single app so long as it was all on a server together. Continue reading

How to force Bamboo to build on Linux

So let’s talk about build servers for a minute. I manage the company’s Bamboo server, which we use to do builds and continuous integration. I don’t know if this is an unusual use case or what, but some of my builds require Windows and others perform best on Linux. So we have Windows agents and Linux agents. Some things you would think are intuitive are not. For example, there’s no way to differentiate in a Script Task between CMD and Bash. Continue reading

Teatime: Containers and VMs

Welcome back to Teatime! This is a weekly feature in which we sip tea and discuss some topic related to quality. Feel free to bring your tea and join in with questions in the comments section. Tea of the week: Ceylon by Sub Rosa Tea. This is a nice, basic, bold tea, very astringent; it’s great for blending so long as you don’t choose delicate flavors to blend with. It really adds a kick! Continue reading