Tuesday 19 June 2012

Bootstrapping an agile project in the cloud via @henrikkniberg

I remember when I started working as a freelancer, and hosting my own websites, I couldn't trust anyone. The cloud was still only a dream, and I couldn't afford an IT guy working for me. Hosting servers were running things that suited the majority of their clients, but not me. I wanted to have full control over my environment. E-mails, ftp, MySQL, and my application providers. It was a huge task, but at least I've picked up a whole lot of infrastructure lore. It took me a few hard-drive crashes and angry customers to realize, I don't want to do that anymore. Luckily, virtual server hosting was already blooming, so I gave Amazon and Linode a go. I migrated my mailing systems to Google Apps, and now I have nothing to worry about. I don't own any hard-drives in production which might fail. I did need to master puppet to make my life easier, but that's for another post.

I've came across a great post showing how to bootstrap a web application in just a few minutes from the first key press in the codebase, to deploying to a production environment. In addition to this, you can observe a very nice way of thinking, and coding as well.

The only debatable thing is when to start actually doing TDD. I would've probably started it earlier in the process, but I guess that bringing it in on demand - when you feel that the complexity rises - should work too.
I really like most of Henrik Kniberg's work. If you're not aware of him, please do take a look at his blog.

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