About a month ago, I joined D-Shaw, Nizar Khalife, Erik Isaksen, and Matt Creager on NodeUp 53 where we discussed about NodeUp podcast and node.js community from NodeUp listeners point of view, and I also talked a bit about Australia, kangaroos, and node. Thanks to Rodd Vagg for pinging me about this particular episode.

Recording the show itself was an interesting experience :). For one, it started at 4am Melbourne EST. I totally missed the two alarms I set up, and was finally awaken by my mobile’s push notification alert from dshaw’s tweet telling me to accept the Skype invitation about two minutes before 4. Ran down the stairs, head spun a bit for the first hour lol.

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This was another quick weekend hack to fix my old dryer’s busted timer problem (busted timer = having to stay around when it’s time to switch off the dryer).

Step one was to use Watts Clever Easy-off Remote Control Socket which allowed me to switch the power on and off remotely. This product comes with a remote control which saved me from having to get out of the house to get to the garage during winter. But that’s not all…

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Here’s how I’ve been monitoring my Jenkins setup…

A combination of Nestor + watch + Terminator » one view for monitoring failing builds, one view for executors status, and one view for job queue. A summary of Jenkins status info on a small screen estate that I can place at the corner of my workspace.

If you want to set up something similar, here are the commands: (assume JENKINS_URL is already set)

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I released DataGen v0.0.9 during lunch break yesterday. This version includes the support to limit how many workers can run concurrently, which is something that I’ve always wanted to add since day one. I finally got the time to do it last weekend, and it turned out to be an easy task thanks to Rod Vagg’s worker-farm module.

Why is this necessary?

The problem with previous versions of DataGen was that when you want to generate 20 data files, then 20 worker processes will be created and run concurrently. It’s obviously not a great idea to have 20 processes fighting over 2 CPUs.

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Sometimes I get the feeling that people think database sharding is like flipping a switch.

In reality, I think it’s more like tuning a set of dials.

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About half a year ago our team started working on a project with micro-service architecture, which means we had a lot of little applications to build as part of our delivery pipeline. One of the reasons why we opted to use this architecture was to gain the ability to replace a piece of component without having to rebuild the whole system, hence enabling faster feedback loop by releasing small chunks of changes in small parts of the system.

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I attended CITCON 2013 in Sydney last February. This year’s sessions covered more non-technical issues compared to CITCON 2010. Two of the more interesting topics for me were on how devops movement could potentially discourage collaboration, and on how large non-tech companies try and still fail to implement continuous delivery.

Those were some of the problems that I’ve been battling for many years. In an organisation where dev and ops are two separate divisions, devops is often a shortcut for dev to do ops tasks while bypassing any ops involvement. Instead, a better alternative would be for dev and ops teams to collaborate and stop fighting over issues like root access.

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Q: _How do you clone 30 repositories from your personal GitHub accounts and 150 repositories from your organisation GitHub accounts in just one line? _ A: repoman --github-user myuser1,myuser2 --github-org myorg1,myorg2 config && repoman init

Q: _How do you execute a set of commands against all repositories in just one line? _ A: repoman exec 'git stash && git pull --rebase && git stash apply'

I wrote Repoman back in 2011 and I’ve been using it ever since. It was my solution to resolve the annoyances involved with working on multiple machines, multiple OSes, multiple SCMs, and multiple repositories that depend on each other.

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The next time a manager asks you the percentage progress of a task, make sure you reply with a float rounded to 2 decimal places, and say it with full confidence.

Sometime in mid 2000s, the manager of a project I was working on had to take an emergency leave, so another manager filled in for him. It was an agile project, but somehow this other manager managed to come up with a magical Gantt chart for the rest of the project. The project was waterfalled!

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Here’s a video of my latest quick weekend hack, using voice to switch a lamp on and off:

Ok, so it’s actually a combination of Watts Clever + Ninja Blocks + Node.js + Automator + Speakable Items. Speakable Items takes the voice commands via MacBook’s internal microphone, then calls the Automator applications, which then runs a Node.js script (which output gets spoken by Automator applications), which then tells Ninja Blocks to actuate Watts Clever power socket.

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