development¶

Look At Your Data - John Rauser

While I couldn't make it to this year's O'Reilly Velocity 2011 I'm excited so the videos are available to watch for free. My favourite talk from last year was John Rauser's "TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance".

This year John delivered an excellent talk entitled look at your data. He demonstrated how looking at averages hides a lot of what's really going on and identifies how toolmakers might improve their offerings.

Modern monitoring software makes it easy to plot a statistic like average latency every minute -- too easy. Fancy dashboards of time series plots often lull us into a false sense of security. Underneath every point on those plots is a distribution, and underneath that distribution is a series of individuals: your customers. - John Rauser

cherry picking git commits

I've been a little bit slow to learn git. I put that down to it being my fourth version control system (after rcs, cvs and svn). Like a fourth child[1] it brought with it less novelty and I've got less free time to get to know it. That being said, git is a revolutionary advance over subversion and is worth committing the effort to learn.

A little while ago I imported my deployment library 'deprec' to github. This week I discovered a feature that shows me what changes other open source developers have been making on their forks of the deprec codebase.

Clicking on that link shows us a diff for that commit and today Pete Yandell was kind enough to show me how to cherry pick a commit and apply it to my repository.

#First we create a branch and pull thewoolleyman's code into it
git checkout -b thewoolleyman
git remote add thewoolleyman git://github.com/thewoolleyman/deprec.git
git pull thewoolleyman master

# Next we find a commit that interests us
# I chose 09dca130c2826339f3cacff937acee4ef26c6d6c
git log

# Compare this changeset with the previous version
# Note that you can use github for this and the previous step.
diff 09dca130c2826339f3cacff937acee4ef26c6d6c 09dca130c2826339f3cacff937acee4ef26c6d6c^

# Change back to our master branch
git checkout master
git cherry-pick 09dca130c2826339f3cacff937acee4ef26c6d6c

# Push the changes to our remote repo (in this case - github)
git push

I'm pretty excited at how simple it is to see what other people have done with my code and merge it into deprec. Github have provided a feature that I think will really aid in the development of open source. Well done guys!

[1] I don't have kids (yet) but if and when I do I hope they realize this was said in jest!