knock:on_wood

I first saw “cowork” as a concept on a Twitter post a year or so ago. Not knowing what it was, it forced me to create a new mental category about work environments. I come from a pretty traditional work environment. For the past 10 years, I’ve worked in a fairly typical office space. It was owned (or leased) by the company by which I was employed. I had a private office with door. It was certainly better than the cubicles of my youth, but I never thought much about it. It was just the office that you had to go to each day as a part of the job.

I’m in the process of figuring out the best way to estimate time and cost on a proposal for an agile project. It’s always a tricky thing. Agile, by nature, is constantly embracing change and harnessing it for the good of the product and the client. So how do you communicate when it will be done or for that matter estimate how much it will cost?

One of the things that I’m passionate about is the development process. So much of the battle is won or lost by the type of development process you have. Leaning on a couple smart guys, I’ve established a very clean workflow in git. If you haven’t read these posts, please do so before continuing. Both are excellent and will help clarify my question.

For the past few years, I’ve used Slicehost for all my production hosting needs. I have been very happy with them. Recently I had a need for a new staging server. It takes a good amount of time to set up a site from scratch on Slicehost, which is fine for production servers, but I needed a site up quickly.

I created a fork on github to ease deployment of Fat Free CRM to Heroku. I found this great post about doing this very thing, but I wanted something a little simpler.

I was initially enamored with the capistrano like features, yet simplicity of Vlad the Deployer. I spent 2 days getting the “simplifed deploy” working. Well, I thought it was anyway. Turns out that it wasn’t deploying the correct version from git.

I finally did it. I took notes as I built a server and am posting it (mainly so I don’t forget). In case someone wants to print this, I left most of the URLs in text so you’d be able to read them. So here it goes.

I love Heroku, I really do. They have eliminated nearly all of the hassle surrounding deployment and server management in the Ruby/Rails world. Here’s the rub…

My employer called me this summer while I was on vacation at the beach with my family to let me know that the doors to our office would be closed upon my return. Not the best news to get when you’re trying to get refreshed and renew the mind.

I was out on a date with my wife last week and in usual fashion, we popped into a Barnes & Noble. She grabbed the lastest edition of People magazine and I wandered over the the “geek” section to browse what’s new. I picked up Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. I figured I would just skim through it put is back but I got hooked.