Best-Practices

I’ve been thinking about continuous delivery a lot lately, and the thing that keeps coming back to me is how much of a pain it is when someone logs into a server and makes a change by hand. You know the type. Production is down, someone jumps in, tweaks a config file, restarts a service, and everything works again. Great. Except now that server has a configuration that exists in no repository, no documentation, and no one else’s head. Next time something breaks, you’ll spend hours chasing a difference that nobody bothered to record. ...

I wrote my first build script in my second year of college. It was a shell script that compiled a few Java files and copied the output into a folder. It worked. For that project, at least. Three years later, working on a team project with five other developers, I realised that script was useless. It assumed a specific directory layout. It assumed a specific version of the JDK. It assumed nobody had moved the source files. It assumed the build machine had the same libraries installed as my laptop. It assumed a lot of things, and every assumption was a potential failure point. ...