Mario Talavera Writes

One of the more empowering tools working in IT is automation tools. Some of my time best spent in past few weeks has been devoted to deploying a WIKI, a SCM System (SVN), a Bug Tracking System (Mantis), etc.

Notice how all these are open source. At the same time, there are plenty of commercial alternatives to each of these. One Company whose products excel (I think) is Atlassian. My issue is that, while their offerings are fantastic; there is usually an open source alternative which, while not as feature rich, is more than feature complete to cater to my needs.

However, yesterday they started offering a starter licensing program where you can buy any of their products for ten dollars each. Looking at their details page, it is easy to see how much ass kicking one gets for $60.00.

At Caxiam Group, we have a very dedicated team of designers, developers and even a few of those people without titles who keep everything working fluently… It’s a shame they don’t get cool titles.

Over the past month and change, I have been tasked with streamlining our development process in the hopes of improving our efficiency, not our velocity. Fortunately we seem to have an abundance of work What we may not have enough of is the time required to manage a large scale operation of sustainable growth.

One of the tools available to us that I believe will greatly benefit the team (at least the technical part of it) is the adoption of an integration server. Currently, we have the ever convoluted method of manually moving and sprinkling files, directories and configurations across a wide array of hardware to make our sites tick.

Stealing a great idea from my peers, I have proposed we employ Hudson as a continuous integration server. We already have some testing going on (way to go Joe) and Hudson will be able to nicely integrate with these test.

Today, I was given the opportunity to present a whole case/showcase of how Hudson can care for all (or most) of our toils with heavy automation. Having seen Brian’s presentation multiple times allowed me to breeze thru some of the hairiest parts of setting a continuous integration server. The only unexpected (and it was pleasant) surprise was the wealth of plugins available for Hudson.

Without any trouble, Hudson plugins provide the ability to send chat messages (thru Jabber), post integration related events to a google calendar, email team members and even integrate with any number of versioning systems. Extensive information about this is be located at Hudson’s Wiki but I think its way easier to just download and install Hudson.

I am running on top of Jetty and just exploring all the features is both fun and empowering. It will certainly free up much needed resources from Caxiam Group’s Team so that we can focus on taking on more and bigger projects in due time.

Depending on the interest of my team, I will be looking further into the more ‘unusual’ features Hudson can provide such as tracking, collecting and aggregating all kinds of metrics on the performance of our build/deploy process, etc. Time will tell…