andrewmccall.com

Announcing Announce.ly

Andrew — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:50:52 +0000

I Released Announce.ly last night, it’s a side project I put together with some of the code that I built for Sproozi.

What’s it good for?

Announce.ly makes it easy to make announcements through twitter.

People have lots of questions about how to use twitter for their business. Should you create an account in the name of the business and use that to communicate, use some of the tools out there to share access to the account. Or you could create an account as a personality to represent the business, many company CEOs do this.

Either way works and there are lots of companies out there following both models successfully but there is another way.

I want to be myself on twitter, I want to make announcements for the projects I’m involved in and I want the project accounts to retweet me when I use hashtags associated with the projects. I don’t want to have to manage accounts for every project.

For example if I tweet an announcement about Announce.ly – “Announce.ly is live! #announcely” then I want the Announce.ly twitter account to retweet it automatically

And that’s what announce.ly does, check it out now to start your free trial then head on over to the Announce.ly blog where we’ll highlight use cases and feature some of our most interesting users.

Some progress on continuous deployment

Andrew — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:33:03 +0000

As I posted a couple of weeks ago I’m working on working a continuous deployment setup so that I can push changes live quicker and easier for the projects I’m working on.

I’ve installed and configured Hudson, which was a good first step. It’s shown me that my builds are a bit fragile, they’re heavily based on packages that I’ve compiled and installed into my local Maven repository. To solve the problem and to make my build a little more sensible I’m getting Artifactory working.

At this stage I’m just trying to get a very basic system in place so that I have an idea of how long a deployment will take. It’s a little more complicated because I’m using Java and the WARs contain all the libraries. I could just use the defaults and push a deployment directly to the target servers, but that doesn’t work. First wars are big, they can easily weigh in at 20Mb.

There are a couple of things I could do here. Ideally I could unroll all the jar libs and only include the classes I need. That would drastically reduce the size, as a bonus I could probably also have it give me a warning that I’m including an unused jar, even better if I could work out the path to the maven dependency. But there’s the whole problem of resources, the fact that using Springframework means most of the classes aren’t being explicitly called and the fact that since I don’t know anything that does all of this this, I’d have to write it all.

So I’ve written that whole idea off, and added a shorter to-do item to make sure I’m only including jars I need. Instead I’ve gone for a far easier solution: deploy exploded wars, and use rsync so I can push only changes to the server.

The next step is to get trigger a Hudson build with a commit-hook and use a successful Hudson build to trigger a script that does the rsync. Then I’ll have very basic continuous deployments up and running albeit without any automatic roll backs of a failed deployment which ultimately is a must, but it’s a start.

GeekUp Hebden Bridge tonight

Andrew — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:34:20 +0000

When: Wednesday February 24th @ 7:00pm
Where: Hole in’t Wall, Hebden Bridge (map)

Read more about Geek Ups in general at Geek Up. Questions, comments etc direct them at me here, on twitter @andrewmccall or email.

Continuous Deployment

Andrew — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:38:20 +0000

I’ve been working lately trying to implement some of the things Eric Ries talks about. Primarily the idea of continuous deployments for lean startups and getting away from the fear of release.

On the surface and looking back on some of the disastrous releases I’ve seen (deployed) it’s a frightening concept. The problem with most of those releases though hasn’t so much been that there was a bug or a problem, it was there was no fall back position – the release was made and there was no way to unmake it. Also working in Java releasing WARs has been a pretty big issue – you have to upload the whole release to fix even a small bug like a typo. One bug in these cases can mean you’re 15-20 minutes from uploading a fix.

It’s a very bad place to be and I want to avoid it at all costs in the future, both the problems and as a result the fear of a release.

With that in mind I’ve been fashioning a system for Sproozi where a release is made as an exploded war using Hudson. On commit it’s tested, deployed to a single server in the cluster and tested some more. The server joins the main cluster and it’s monitored as the release is pushed to the rest of the servers to make sure it’s stable.

The only problem I’m having conceptually is how do I treat a commit that comes in before a release is finished – I guess I have to sit on it, but what if the release fails and I have to lock the repository? What about if the release is a success but in the meantime I have 2, 3 or even more commits that I’m sitting on? Do I deploy them one at a time until they’re either all successful or one fails?

How has anyone else practising dealt with these issues?

2nd Hebden Bridge Geek Up

Andrew — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:51:34 +0000

When: Wednesday January 27th @ 7:00pm
Where: Hole in’t Wall, Hebden Bridge (map)

Tomorrow night we’re hosting the second Hebden Bridge Geekup, we skipped December because it fell on the 30th.

The first was a success we had a good turn out. As with the last one, we’re still finding our feet so there is no formal agenda or presentations planned. Of course if anyone has anything they want to present or a project they want to talk about drop me a line if you do and we’ll sort something out.

Read more about Geek Ups in general at Geek Up. Questions, comments etc direct them at me here, on twitter @andrewmccall or email.

EC2 Spot instances

Andrew — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:45:43 +0000

The thing I really like about Amazon’s cloud stuff is they’re constantly undermining themselves with new innovations – spot instances are another great example. Taking the utility metaphor a step further you can now rent their services when nobody else is for cheaper, like buying electricity at night.

A lot of the tasks I’m envisioning for Sproozi aren’t really time dependent. While it’s important to show you a page in a timely manner, crawl and index a brand new website you add quickly and basically be interactive there is also a lot I have to do in the background. The huge and growing list of URLs people add all need to be re-crawled and re-indexed regularly is just one of many examples of processing vast amounts of data. These tasks are always running, always in the background.

Spot instances are a perfect fit – I can bid the price I want on extra capacity spin up some extra instances to join the cluster when they’re cheap. Over the next few weeks I’ll probably try to add some spot instances to my Hadoop dev cluster and see what happens.

Signups via twitter API

Andrew — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:04:08 +0000

This is possibly big news, something I’ve hoped they would do for a long time and something Fred Wilson voiced his support for a few weeks ago: Creating user accounts via the twitter API.

Both the projects I’m working on full time could benefit from this. Sproozi of course because we could create user accounts for them and help users find interesting local people to follow. My oft promised side project which at it’s most basic level [the one I'll launch first] aims to make making announcements easier could benefit by making the signup process seamless – users wouldn’t have to already have to have a twitter account, they could create it all in one step with us.

That I think is what makes this such big news, sites that rely on users already having a twitter account to do something useful will be able to create that account as a seamless on site process. That will help drive users to the sites and drive users to twitter. Let’s hope they start rolling it out to other developers!

Twitter Extends Sign-Ups Off-Site As It Seeks New Users (mashable.com)

There’s no money in it

Andrew — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:00:09 +0000

I followed up with a few potential investors who’ve had my pitch for Sproozi today. It’s been a week or two since I heard from them and I honestly wasn’t surprised when they came back with a no. Not hearing anything doesn’t exactly show a great deal of excitement.

I’m an optimist though and on the bright side I haven’t had a conversation or a meeting that I haven’t benefited from.

With first VC I met I had a pretty friendly audience, I knew him already, and I got some really good advice about how aspects of the pitch, the business in general and some introductions. With another, less friendly, it was clear I hadn’t done my homework. In yet another I learned a bit more and took on board the suggestion that I get a core set of users together to beta test the project – that basically just launching it blind was probably not going to go anywhere.

The rest of my meetings and conversations have been just as good. In each one I’ve refined my pitch further had clearer and better prepared answers for questions but I think I may be making one mistake that is keeping me from getting funded- trying to0 soon.

I’m starting to think that, because I have to explain the idea. I really s to be able to just give someone a link they can click and play with. With a link and 10 minutes, countless objections can be overcome and services that sound similar dismissed – it also gives a pretty clear idea of exactly what the thing does. I can’t possibly manage that level of understanding in any pitch, no matter how long or how refined.

So what’s next? I’ve got a side project I keep hinting about that’s painfully close to ready to launch very soon and then I’m going to keep working on Sproozi, get it to the point where I can send that link, develop some feedback from users and get some interesting data – get it to the point where I’m talking about what we are doing, not what we want to do. I’m not put off, if anything I’m more focused on distilling Sproozi down to the minimum set of features I can launch with.

If you haven’t already, signup for the super-secret-pre-alpha on the Sproozi site and as soon as I get there, I’ll let you know.

GeekUp Hebden Bridge

Andrew — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:12:02 +0000

It’s cold, wet and pretty nasty outside, but tonight is our first GeekUp in Hole in’t Wall in Hedben Bridge @7:00. If you’re local and a geek about anything, come down.

Useful commit messages

Andrew — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:17:08 +0000

I realised that I’m not very good at this when I looked at my last commit for this theme. The message was “added a few things” a message I find myself using when I have nothing else to say, or if I’ve done too much work and either can’t remember all of what I did or be bothered writing it all out.

It’s bad form though, and I’m trying to learn my way into using git properly to make it happen less. Basically I’m still trying to find the right place between a commit for a unit of work and my previous more traditional view that all commits must compile and pass tests. At the same time I’m trying to reconcile that with a Kanban board way of organising what to do.

How does everyone else commit? When, how often and what ‘rules’ do you apply?