This is part two of the Holacracy series. If you’re intrested in the whole story of us implementing Holacracy, you might want to start at the beginning.
Last week we had our first two Governance meetings. These meetings are about how the team is acting as a whole and what can be improved to make things run smoother. Day-to-day work related stuff seem to have no place in these meetings, other than maybe on a meta level. We had a good taste of how these meetings go in Holacracy.
Our development team is implementing Holacracy. It is a learning process for us and I plan on writing about this process as I attend the trainings and while we struggle through the implementation. This first post is about our basic understanding (and initial skepticism) of Holacracy, and the types of meetings needed to implement it properly.
Our setup includes Nginx + Unicorn + Capistrano. This gives us great app performance, it’s thread-safe and deploys are blazing fast. But somehow, after a while, we were experiencing downtime during deploys. Our Unicorn config was similar to Github’s with only a few differences:
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Almost everybody at Springest uses iDoneThis, a simple productivity logging tool. For a while, we’ve had this awesome iAlfredThis plugin. A nifty Alfred plugin that allowed us to post productivity to iDoneThis from within Alfred. Back in the days when we wrote the plugin we were mainly a PHP oriented company. However, nowadays we are a mostly a Ruby shop so I released “idid” today: a gem that provides a handy command line interface to iDoneThis for us devs who dwell inside our terminals all day.
We have been struggling with a problem here at Springest for the last couple of weeks. It’s a bit of a long story, but it begins with our recent transition to a new codebase for Springest, built on Ruby on Rails, and some improvements that we have planned to support our Springest GO (Dutch) functionality and ends with us submitting a pull request to the Rails project to fix a couple of bugs. Continue reading
Here at Springest we use Solr to drive our search and subject pages. Since making the move to Ruby on Rails, we have been using the Sunspot gem to implement Solr functionality. Continue reading
Just a quick tip for when you need to serve different 500 pages for each language that you support on your site, while using nginx. Of course you could use one 500 page with a message in multiple languages, but that’s not really elegant. Unlike this solution! Continue reading
During a recent deploy I noticed that the precompilation of our assets had become quite slow, taking somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes at times. Since we deploy several times a day at Springest, I like to keep our deploys as fast as possible and therefore I dived into our asset pipeline to see what I could optimize.
One of the best things about the (web) software development industry is the open approach towards sharing knowledge. I can’t think of any other industry where best practices, new features and old tricks are shared so readily amongst one another. I love this culture of sharing and I think it’s what drives innovation and helps us continually get better at what we do. Continue reading
After the umpteenth time I found a focus: true line in one of my already committed and pushed files, I thought it would be nice to write a little git hook to prevent this from ever happening again. And while I was at it, do something about committing .orig files too. Continue reading
