Feature Flipping Grails Plugin: Part 1
The other day I wrote about my interest in support Feature Flipping in Production environments. Since I have been doing a lot of development in grails lately, I wanted to develop a plugin to support this functionality. And here it is!
This blog post is about how to use it. If you want to know about the types of features it supports, I have documented them on the plugin page, and if you are interested in the reasoning for this, check out my previous post.
In this post I am going to describe the process of installing the plugin and configuring it. Then in a subsequent post, I will show you how to create a page […]
Feature Flipping
Some time ago I read in great interest about Flickr's Blog post on "flipping out", which is the ability to switch features on and off for a particular application in production. I know some of friends had implemented this so, I wanted to give it a go.
Some of the benefits to it include;
Ability to push untested code into production (controversial)
Theoretically make changes much faster as you don't really have to wait for a neat release point (as long as you have a stable build)
Ability to turn features on and off in production without having to redeploy
Support a "push on green" strategy
Support Continuous Deployment Strategy
But before you get too excited, you do need to have some important foundations. Firstly, you need fantastic test coverage, […]
Qantas’s 90th Birthday Party
Today I went to Qantas’s 90th Birthday party at their Jet base in Sydney’s Mascot Airpot. John Travolta, the official ambassador for Qantas, was there along with a showcase of Aircraft that staff and friends could work around and through. Aircraft such as the original Constellation, the 707 V-Jet (John Travolta’s Personal Plane now), 767 and the might Airbus A380!!!
Here are some photos I took today.
Why I’ve given up on Mail.app
I wouldn’t consider myself a Mac Fanboy (because I use and like other platforms and OSes) but I truly admire the constant quality that comes out of Cupertino. Their hardware, software, strategy and brand just comes together brilliantly.
But many of their applications are quite flawed, and need a lot of work. Regardless, I’ll typically persist with what they have to offer and eventually, with software upgrades, the software becomes quite good.
Some recent examples included iCal, which was pretty hopeless when it started, but it’s pretty good now. ITunes continuously improves, Safari has become a great browser and even iWork has become a great work tool.
But there is one exception that frustrates me to no end, and that’s Mail.app. It’s a pretty good application, but […]
Surround yourself with great people!
They are famous words that have echoed with me for nearly 15 years. They were spoken to me by one of my early mentors in business. The discussion was around where you should invest in a business. And no matter how you looked it; great technology, great ideas, great processes, and even unique concepts are nothing without GREAT PEOPLE to execute on them!
There is much discussed about how you should find great people. The recruitment process, the interview process, psychometric testing, what ever processes you want to implement, they need to work for you to be able to find the great people that you need to surround yourself with.
Great people need to not only be highly skilled in their areas of expertise, but they […]
No#1 Album in Australia? Easy, Just sell 3,600 Albums!
Crazy as it sounds, that’s all it took this week to be the No#1 Selling album in Australia. British band, “Bring Me the Horizon” sold 3,600 copies of their album to debut at the No#1 spot on the Australian Aria Charts.
If nothing else, I think this just goes to show how irrelevant physical CD sales are becoming, and for that matter, traditional charting has become irrelevant. These days, charts are attempting to use combinations of Album Sales, Radio airplay, downloads on iTunes and other combinations to determine who is No#1 and why.
The fact that Album sales are becoming irrelevant is actually quite humorous. Before working in technology, I used to work in the music industry, and artists would live and die by their charts. […]
Who drives the requirements?
One of the challenges with any software development team is to understand who should be driving the requirements? Typically this should be the responsibility of the Product Manager. But at Posse, we don’t have a Product Manager, instead, product management is done by myself and the CEO. This may be a little unusual, but as a startup, we have limitations on who, and how many people are on our team.
When taking this approach, there are some guidelines that you should follow;
Understand who your customers are, because that is who you are building for. Make sure that everyone agrees to this. I have been in situations where I believed that a certain group was our customers whilst others disagreed. This meant we were constantly clashing […]
New Role – CTO Posse.com
A few weeks ago I ‘officially’ became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Posse.com, an Australian tech startup that provides a product & service affiliate sales channel for Social Networks that currently focusses on selling tickets to events.
So what is an “affiliate sales channel” you ask? Think of it this way; as our lives on the internet evolve, we find that we are rediscovering the old word-of-mouth adage through our new trusted networks; the online social networks. We are constantly turning to twitter, facebook and other platforms to ask questions such as “Where is the best Italian restaurant?”, “What do you think of product X before I buy it?” or “Who is going to this event?”
Posse gives users the ability to actively promote things […]
Making Virgin Mobile Broadband to work on Mac
After much frustration, I finally got my Virgin Mobile Huawai E160e modem to work on my MacBook Pro!!! And although it shouldn’t be that difficult, there is one quirk that I needed to do to make it work.
UPDATE: I have now used this solution on 2 different Macbook Pros; a 15″ 3.06 Core 2 Duo and now my new 15″ 2.6GHz i7.
Firstly, you don’t need the Virgin Connect application that comes with the modem, in fact I recommend you DON’T use it as its slower. Its a Java application, and Desktop Java applications are not known for their startup speed.
You will need the drivers, and the latest drivers can be found here. This link is actually from the Virgin Mobile Help Ticket on […]
Bluetooth Plantronics 906 Backbeat Headphones Review
Like many people that work in front of their PC’s and Macs, I spend a bit of time on different types of calls; mobile, landline, Skype, and Conference Calls. I am my Skype and my iPhone a lot, but never seem to find a happy place for what devices I use to listen to or speak on.
My solution so far has been to use a Logitech headset on my Mac when I am Skype calls or conference calls (where audio is done through the Mac), and I use the iPhone headset that is provided in the box. But I have issues with this; 1) as much as I like the Logitech headset, I don’t find it comfortable for long periods of time and always […]
