Episode 2 of Scalable Teams on RailsLab
26 March 2009 at 10:06 pm | In Affiliate, Agile, Rails, Tutorials | Leave a Comment
Wolf Arnold of RubyFocus has added a second episode in his series on Scalable Teams on RailsLab. In this episode Wolf discusses team leadership. He is joined once again by Ed Hieatt, VP of engineering and Davis Frank, software engineer, both of Pivotal Labs, the leading firm in agile development.
It’s one thing to say that you must be a good leader to insure team productivity and scalability. But what does leadership mean in the context of a software development team? Wolf, Ed, and Davis identify the individual behaviors which you can use to provide your team the leadership they will need from you to succeed.
Winners of New Relic API Contest Announced
25 March 2009 at 11:54 pm | In Affiliate, Product Update, RPM in the News, Support, Tutorials | 2 CommentsA couple months ago with the introduction of a data API for New Relic RPM, we announced the API Contest to encourage use of the API among our customers. We had many submissions from individuals and from our Affiliates. Our judges evaluated each entry on four criteria – Usefulness to a developer or operations team; Creativity; Ease of implementation; and Use of API features. The judges have evaluated the submissions by individuals and named the four winners. The scoring was remarkably close. Congratulations to all of our contestants. Here are the winners.
First Place: Mac System Bar Status – David Smith
David is with CrossForward a Rails development shop in Virginia. He has won our first place prize of a $1,000 Amazon gift certificate. His submission can be found on GitHub. “I have created a Mac OS X Stats Bar Application that uses the API to keep a constant dashboard of your application’s status in your screen’s corner at all times.” If you are a Mac user, you will find yourself glancing at the RPM status lights all the time. A real time saver.
Second Place: New Relic status in your Firefox browser – Jesse Andrews
Jesse writes on his website Overstimulate.com. He is a contract developer in SF. His submission can be found at his website. “After entering your license key (found in the Accounts tab of your dashboard), your application’s health is checked every minute, showing the traffic lights for your selected app. To change between your applications you can click on the new relic dropdown menu. Hovering on the traffic light gives you more information, clicking on the lights takes you to the overview for your application.”
Third Place: NewRelic iGoogle Gadget – Luc Castera
Luc Castera was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he now lives in the DC Metropolitan area. He is the co-founder of ShareMeme. “I’ve created an iGoogle Gadget that shows the status of all the applications you have on RPM. You can add the gadget to your page by going to Google. Once you have added the application, put in your NewRelic RPM License key and it should load your ‘lights’. It refreshes the data every minute.”
Fourth Place: NR Notify – John Williams
John is a developer with Contegix. Contegix, based in St. Louis, MO, provides high-level managed hosting solutions for enterprise applications. You can find John’s submission at the Contegix site. “NR Notify is a simple ruby based notification tool for New Relic RPM. With NR Notify you can add email and SMS notifications to your Ruby on Rails and Merb applications. By using the the New Relic API, NR Notify provides email and SMS notifications based off of your ‘Traffic Light’ settings within New Relic.”
Congratulations to all our winners, and thank you to all of our contestants. We encourage you to try your own hand at developing a creative and useful application of the RPM API.
Note that New Relic does not maintain these applications nor do we support or guarantee them for use with your own data.
It’s Official – We Are Cool
24 March 2009 at 12:47 am | In Did You Know, News | Leave a CommentLast week Gartner, the leading analyst firm, included New Relic in its report “Cool Vendors in IT Operations and Virtualization, 2009.” More about the Cool Vendor report methodology below.
In the report, Gartner notes “Advances associated with virtualization will continue to drive the need for management tools that can address the increasing scale and dynamic nature of virtual infrastructures. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) models are becoming increasingly popular for management technology providers to lower operation costs and to deliver more advanced capabilities.”
The report also includes in its recommendations that IT organizations should “Include evaluations of SaaS-based management offerings for your application- and infrastructure-monitoring needs, but make sure to fully understand the total costs, as well as available service levels.”
Our reaction is “That’s what we have been saying for the past year.” While our product RPM is the most powerful app performance management tool for Rails, the way we deliver that power provides some of the compelling reasons why Rails users select it – affordability, ease of implementation, and flexible, month-to-month terms of service.
We never tried to be considered “cool” when we started New Relic. We just thought we would try to make the best Rails management tool you could find. It’s nice, though, someone thinks we’re doing both.
About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection Process Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.
RailsLab – New Content on Scaling your Dev Team
19 March 2009 at 3:03 pm | In Affiliate, Agile, Partners, Rails, Tutorials | Leave a Comment
When we hear the word scalability we normally think about things like caching, database architecture, server configurations, etc. But if you have ever been in a development team undergoing the pressure of client demands combined with turnover within the team, you will appreciate this week’s episode on RailsLab called Scalable Teams.
Wolf Arnold, a founding partner of Rubyfocus, has created a two-part series exploring some of the ways Rails dev teams can be as scalable as the apps they create. In addition to his own experiences, he draws upon the wisdom of Ed Hieatt and Davis Frank of Pivotal Labs, the leading Agile Development firm and Rails pioneer. Discover some of their innovative techniques for improving team productivity while maintaining the enjoyment of software development.
Thanks Wolf, for Scalable Teams.
Learn a Cool RAILS_ENV on RailsLab
12 March 2009 at 9:42 pm | In RailsLab | Leave a Comment
This week we added two more episodes on RailsLab, both focused on improving the development phase of the lifecycle. Jim Gochee, New Relic’s engineering leader, created both episodes.
The first is a screencast called RAILS_ENV=local_production. It takes you through a very handy technique where you use your production databases to test the pre-production, or desktop version of your application. This helps you get past what can be a frustrating and time consuming development problem – creating a test database that looks like your real database and contains enough real data to enable a decent set of tests.
The second episode this week is a short paper called How Performance Feedback can Reduce Testing in Agile Development, which discusses a trend we are beginning to see within Rails shops, including our own. Using a good performance monitoring tool and agile development techniques, dev teams can safely accelerate their development speed by short circuiting or even omitting some app testing. Sounds scary? Jim and Ward Cunningham of Aboutus.org explain how going faster and application reliability can be compatible goals.
RSS Feed
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
