A few months ago at Made Tech the Finery team switched to GitHub. Before the move we pushed commits directly into the master branch. Commit notifications with links to the diffs would then come up on the Finery channel on our HipChat server, and members of the team could review the commits at their own leisure. There was no commitment to code review.
Made Tech Blog
All looking rather Dashing
At Made we collect a lot of metrics. From projects, to servers, to support, to admin. All of these are stored in various services and it’s not that easy to get quick and simple visibility of these.
Pros and Cons of Ruby on Rails
Here at Made Tech we’re big fans of Ruby and use Ruby on Rails for most of our web applications. Over the years we’ve had countless conversations about the pros and cons of Ruby.
Four ways to break your code for the greater good
Software development is all about managing complexity. We employ tools like automated testing to guard existing functionality from regression.
Picking the right Product Owner
For a lot of our customers working with Made is their first exposure to Agile. As part of any project, we’ll ask them to nominate a Product Owner to work closely with us throughout. Picking the right person for the job can make or break the project – so how do you make sure you choose correctly?
There is more to code quality than coverage
As developers we always strive to write the best code possible and, while we test for it, coverage doesn’t always tell the full story of the quality of your code output.
IaaS vs. PaaS: what we’ve learned
We’ve been long-time proponents of PaaS, or Platform as a Service. We’ve also been long-time consumers of IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service.
Boundaries in Object Oriented Design
As responsible programmers we like to write programs to the best of our ability. As our profession has evolved so too have our languages and the tools we use. We identify around concepts, patterns and principles.
Stream Everything
‘Streams’ and ‘pipes’ have been an essential part of *nix systems since the 1970s, when Doug McIlroy introduced them into the first version of Unix. The story goes that he threatened to leave the project if they weren’t implemented, he felt so strongly that they were a cornerstone of an effective modular operating system, and key to interoperability. They facilitate the Unix philosophies of ‘do one thing and one thing well’ and ‘write programs that speak to other programs.’ A small Unix program like ‘cat’, which concatenates the contents of one or more files and prints out the buffer, is able to communicate with other programs through piping. You could ‘cat’ a file containing a list of words, pipe that to a sorting program, and then finally to a text file. You could write this complex operation more simply than you could explain it.
Our Favourite Retrospective Ideas
Ah, the sprint retrospective. When I first joined Made and found out about retrospectives (I’d never had one before), I couldn’t conceive of the idea that there would be any value in such a thing! So you’re telling me, I said, that we get together and do group exercises? Not about the work that we’re about to do, but work we’ve already done? I assumed that it must be a whine-fest about tasks we found tricky, or rationalising out loud about why something took so long to do. I was wrong.
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