A blog by Emmanuel Goossaert
I am not into social network websites, and when it comes to keeping in touch with people, I like to use good old emails. However, as my contact list and the diversity of these contacts expand, I am having problems following up with everybody. When networking with people met on…
1. Why using printf debugging when debuggers are available? Certain cases of socket, multi-threaded, or asynchronous programming make extremely difficult, by design, the use of debuggers or logging libraries. This is when printf debugging is the most useful. 2. Limitations of printf debugging The two main issues with printf debugging…
In a previous article, I was talking about optimum price and segmentation to augment profit. You can read that here. Sure, one can create different versions of a product to segment the customers and set an optimal price for each segment. But one cannot control the competition. This means that…
Setting the right price for a product is always a very complex task. Looking for the optimum price on a supply and demand curve would be the first step. However, most of the time you do not have this supply and demand curve. So you test different prices during long-enough…
Fritz the Cat is an independent animated feature from 1972, directed by Ralph Bakshi and based on the eponymous comic strip by Robert Crumb. With a budget of $850,000 and a gross revenue of $100M, Fritz the Cat is the most successful independent animated feature as of today. This is…
So I have been working at a startup company for about two months now, and I already learned many great things. I am not talking about new frameworks or programming tricks, but about peer-interaction and productivity. Coming with an academic background to a fully-pragmatic startup is not easy, and I…
I have seen many blog posts about Twitter bots, but they all seem pretty useless to me. People have this tendency to overuse things like Markov chains or other conversational agent library, just to make their bot look cool. But what’s the point of all that, and what problem are…
The rate at which gaming is penetrating the different layers of our societies has been rapidly increasing during the last decade. Sure, part of this is due to the fact that kids playing in the 80’s are now 30 to 40-year old, but another good part of it is a direct consequence of the vulgarization of video games in general. With the Wii and now Kinect, no need for fancy game pads and killer finger skills to play video games. A vector of this acceleration is also the recent urge in the social media world. With Facebook, social games have emerged, taking advantage of social and psychological constraints. Games are no longer confined to the virtual world, and are crushing into the real world.
When developing a web site or web application, it is always a hassle to first commit the code to the repository, and then use FTP or SCP to update the code on the web server. Various IDEs allow to automatize this “code synchronization” process with a simple button to click, however this is still one additional step on the developer’s mind. We all went through these moments where, developing late in the night, we were trying to fix a bug and realized that we were working on the wrong version as we had forgotten to update the code on the web server. What a waste of time! For the development of a recent project, that includes sharing code with other developers, I decided to put an end to this code synchronization issue, by making it fully automatic. In this article, I first present the problem and my design of a configuration-independent solution. Then, I apply this solution to the specific context of my project, which uses Python as a web server, BitBucket/Mercurial as a repository solution, and Apache/PHP to handle the commit notifications.
Manually updating the files on a web server after a commit is a simple and straightforward step. However, it can be the source of various errors, such as:
1. Accidentally uploading the files in a wrong location on the web server
2. Forgetting to update the code on the web server and waste time debugging a deprecated version
3. Being distracted by thinking about updating the code on the web server, and losing focus on the development flow
4. Wasting time, as even if updating manually takes only a few seconds, these seconds will add up dramatically
The actual step of committing the code to the repository can hardly be automatized, as only the developer can say when the code is ready to be pushed. On the contrary, updating the code on the web server could easily be avoided. A simple system would be to get the web server to update its files and restart automatically whenever a commit is made to the repository. Figure 1 below describes the design of this automatic synchronization system.
During the Gold Rush of California in 1849, thousands of men were ready to put at stake all they had in the hope of a better life. The software industry that we are currently experiencing shows, to a certain extent, very similar patterns. Smartphone and source code have replaced the traditional pick and scoop, however the goals and hopes remained the same. But is there anything for developers to expect from this gold rush of software?
