Daily bread 08/30/2017

• Hajj 2017: Why, when and how? | Hajj 2017 News | Al Jazeera

  • make their way to
  • is made up of
  • re-enacts

• How Chocolate is Made - ESL Listening Comprehension

  tags: chocolate

• Letter of invitation

• How devops tools accelerate software delivery - Computerworld

  tags: software-development-101

  • developer
  • write code against a database
  • database administrator
  • access to the production database.
  • DBA
  • operations manager
  • spun up a virtual machine
  • table and index schema
  • syntactically valid test data
  • configuration file and scripts
  • agile
  • devops
  • devops offers a big box of tools that automate the way around requests
  • These tools can be divided into sets that support each step in the software development lifecycle, from coding to integration to deployment to monitoring to bug reporting.
  • For a developer, working life revolves around a development environment.
  • Existing code lives in a repository, such as Git or Team Foundation Server (TFS),
  • developer’s first task every day (after the daily stand-up meeting that agile organizations hold first thing) is to check out or clone all of the code of interest from the shared repository
  • merging, integrating, and testing
  • defect manager (be it Bugzilla, JIRA, Redmine, TFS, or any other tracker
  • “tickets” (bug reports or task assignments)
  • IDE such as Eclipse or Visual Studio often has a window into the defect manager
  • The developer will either continue yesterday’s project, or shelve that and handle a higher-priority ticket, if there is one.
  • IDEs often integrate tightly with repositories
  • a command-line console open for check-ins and check-outs.
  • bug trackers often integrate with source code repositories.

  • The code editor is usually the core component of an IDE
  • introduce merge conflicts
  • Developers’ build tools
 depend on the programming language(s) they’re writing in
  • compiled languages,
  • the syntax of the language,
  • code editor
  • flag errors in the background during coding and highlight the syntax with colors
  • already-defined variable
  • When developers write and test code, they often spend the majority of the day running a debugger.
  • in an organization that has implemented devops, they often have the luxury of debugging in a virtualized environment that faithfully reflects the production environment.
  • use stub code to represent server actions or have local databases stand in for remote databases.
  • help developers run their unit tests and regression tests easily and on a regular basis.
  • Test runners
  • the testing framework integrates with the IDE and any local repository,
  • check-in,
  • The developer’s tests should flow into the code integration environment through the shared repository, along with the source code that the developer has debugged and tested.
  • Code integration tools take the code in a shared repository, build it, test 
it, and report on the results.
  • continuous integration server
  • tie into automated build tools, automated test runners, automated reporting via email and defect managers, and actions on the repository.
  • Jenkins,
  • implement continuous integration for every code push
  • a delay is introduced after a code push so that multiple pushes can be combined into the next build.
  • incremental build time is small
  • run nightly “clean” builds and tests, often on freshly provisioned test environments.
  • Deployment tools and environments
  • continuous integration server
  • deploy builds
  • deployment and configuration management tools
  • vary depending on the run-time platform and the additional infrastructure.
  • some configuration management tools – such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, and Vagrant – work across a wide range of platforms by using widely supported languages. Ansible and Salt are Python-based systems; Chef, Puppet, and Vagrant are Ruby-based.
  • Software containers such as Docker
  • In the grand scheme of a software lifecycle, each feature moves from design to development to testing to staging to production, while bug reports feed back to the developers for triage and fixes at each stage.
  • what needs to be automated is the release process management; in addition, teams need to automate their tests, bug tracking, building, packaging, configuration, and promotion processes.

  • Runtime monitoring tools

  • Acceptance testing
  • performance testing
  • load testing
  • application performance
  • a spike in usage, a memory leak that manifests over time, a bad spot on a disk, an overloaded server, or an ill-considered database index
  • Application performance monitoring is intended to continually create metrics for the key performance indicators that matter to your application.
  • DDCM (deep dive component monitoring) agents
  • Bug reporting and reproduction tools
  • defect managers
  • reported defect will be accompanied by a detailed description, a root cause, a script to reproduce the problem, and it will be assigned to the developer most familiar with the relevant code.
  • remotely entering and running diagnostics on the user’s machine.

  • Sometimes such problems will not reproduce on a developer’s machine. One common reason for this is that the development box is too fast and has too much memory to show the problem. Another possibility is that the developer has a library installed that the user lacks. And a third is that the user has another application installed that interferes with yours.
  • user’s runtime environment,
  • create a similar runtime environment in a VM
  • configuration management tools
  • test VM may run locally on the developer’s machine, on a server, or on an IaaS cloud.
  • Vagrant
  • it’s useful to have a scaled-down copy of the production application running in a PaaS, so that changes never propagate to the production environment.
  • a change set added to the code repository,
  • regression tested
  • all acceptance tests will be run
  • release manager or customer service manager
  • propagate the change to production or schedule it for later integration
  • give the user a patch or an operational work-around.
  • modern agile application lifecycle
  • after which an application version is released from development to testing.
  • sprints – typically one to two weeks
  • a given build’s climb from development to testing to staging to production.
  • lifecycle of a story card or application feature.
  • bug reports and fixes.
  • easily bog down at any stage.
  • purpose of devops is to see that the routine things, such as bringing up a clean test database or promoting a build, are quick and easy, so that the developers can concentrate on building actual features and fixing real bugs.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.