We run our infrastructure off of cloudflare, so we can easily spin up a staging environment that's an exact replica of production (only difference is # and size of instances). We also run a staging jenkins server that's defined in the cloudflare config.
We keep our jenkins jobs version controlled by checking in each job's config.xml into a git repo. In the past I've seen the config.xml files managed by puppet or other config management tools.
This helps us get around the "hard to backup" and "test in production" issues. We can test out jenkins changes in staging, commit those changes to our jenkins repo, and then push up the config.xml file to the production jenkins server when we're ready to deploy.
This is exactly what we're building at Out Of Office. We've built a database of free and bookable spaces to work, meet, take calls, or take a break. We've collected all sorts of data you might find useful, like the number of seats, number of outlets, noise level, and other different amenities that we've rolled up into an 11-point score for each venue.
We've scouted thousands of coffee shops, hotel lobbies, parks, libraries, coworking, and other public spaces.
Right now we're only operating in San Francisco, but looking to expand to other cities in the future.
Are you planning on making your service available via your website? I'd be curious to look at it when you get down to the south bay, but there's a 0% chance I'm installing an app for something I have such a passing interest in.
We're focusing on mobile right now because finding a workspace is heavily dependent on where you are or where you need to be. We're a small scrappy team right now so we don't have the resources to build out a proper web experience that we'd be proud of. We'd love to build one in the future though!
Take a look at Out Of Office next time you're looking for a place to work. We've built a database of free and bookable spaces to work, meet, take calls, or take a break. We've built it for ourselves and for people like you who work on the go and may work in multiple locations throughout the day.
Right now we're only operating in San Francisco, but looking to expand to other cities in the future.
At Out Of Office we use slack for day to day communication and always require video chat for team meetings unless you're on the go or not able to use video.
For longer term alignment we always post "decisions" that are made during these meetings in a slack channel so that others can keep up to date if they weren't in the meeting. We can also go back in time to see the context of why a decision was made.
PHP is 25 years old this year. Despite all the hate it gets, the core team continues to move the language forward, and it most definitely has its niche in web development.
Every single example the OP laid out is solved by an official laravel package. People love to hate on PHP but I can spin up a laravel app with all of those features in a matter of hours.
I can build a traditional server side rendered app or I can use the front end scaffolding to build an API driven SPA based on vue or react.
A related question: Are there any programming books you wish were written?
My long term side project has been to bootstrap an independent publishing house focused on technical topics. I'm always looking to hear what programming books people think are missing in the market.
Some recurring topics I keep seeing are more books on the soft skills / career development side of things, and more project based books that help you learn how certain technologies work internally by building a database, queue system, web framework, etc. from scratch.
Beautiful Code is a book that actually exists but I found disappointing in that the title describes a book that I'd like to see but I found most of the examples disappointing and not very beautiful. I'd love to see a book that lived up to the title better.
I'd like to see a good book on error handling. I feel this is still one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering (alongside naming) and most programming books just don't do it and say something like "obviously this is not production code but error handling would clutter up the examples too much". That to me is indicative of the problem.
I like the project based book idea. Physically Based Rendering is a rather nice example of this but I don't know of too many other similar books in other domains.
Maybe Programming Pearls achieves what Beautiful Code did not? Or Hackers Delight?
I think it's hard for code to be beautiful when it's mostly glue (calling libraries) rather than implementing a basic task (like sorting). As such, most modern (glue) languages are less likely to evoke aesthetic wonder in the reader than might a simpler, low level language like C or Pascal.
Programming Pearls is great (I haven't read Hacker's Delight) but it's mostly "programming in the small". I think it would be interesting to see a book that took real world projects and looked at some core piece of them that is particularly elegant or clever. The core of how git manages its data structure for example, or the Quake BSP. In practice most such real code is probably too tangled up with the rest of the project to be very suitable for this approach unfortunately.
I would love a project based book that tries to teach me the core principles and gives me some guidance and experience in building with a specific technology.
There are som fine guides online, but they usually don't have the scope or "budget" of a book. That being said, I loathe those massive 1500 page tomes that brand themselves as an "introduction" to the subject (I mean that first book in the linked article, "Introduction to Algorithms", 1300 pages), it really demotivates me when thinking about having to delve into those to learn the basics.
It would be nice with books in the 200-300 page range, and maybe doing project based books to teach the ropes and pitfalls of a technology would solve that. Then there's the possibility to make follow-ups with more intermediary topics or projects.
I would like a Computer Science 102 book. I'm a self taught programmer and started learning through a couple CS 101 books (eg. John Guttag). Those 101 skills were enough for me to run an online business via python/django. However, I don't know what's next to make me a better programmer. I'm assuming learning algorithms is the next step, but I don't really know.
Looking to get better at building web apps. I just don’t know if there is a better way of structuring my code, making it more maintainable, more efficient. Sometimes when I look at my code from a year ago, I think it’s embarrassingly bad.
Thanks for the input! I'll make note of these topics and look for some writers in these areas. I agree, I kind of hit a plateau in my technical skills, but these project based tutorials really helped push me forward again.
I would agree with this. I have a much better understand of how a database works after doing a small side project trying to implement one. I can imagine it would be helpful for other technologies as well such a docker, react, redis, etc.
We keep our jenkins jobs version controlled by checking in each job's config.xml into a git repo. In the past I've seen the config.xml files managed by puppet or other config management tools.
This helps us get around the "hard to backup" and "test in production" issues. We can test out jenkins changes in staging, commit those changes to our jenkins repo, and then push up the config.xml file to the production jenkins server when we're ready to deploy.