Partially Attended

an irregularly updated blog by Ian Mulvany

blog posts about development

Setting up Vagrant, Librarian-Chef and Vagrant aws plugins on OSX Mavericks.

I have a new macbook pro. I want to install vagrant, chef and librarian, with the vagrant-aws plugins. I’m working on OSX Mavericks, and I want to get as clean an install as possible. For the most part I am also using the fish shell. This is what I’ve just run through over the last 20 minutes. Install command line tools from the terminal $ xcode-select --install Next we are going to install homebrew, with homebrew we will install rvm and with rvm we will install ruby. ... (more)

Cambridge usability group - UX and agile

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a UXer within an agile environment. I thought it was a great talk. When at Mendeley we always faced the problem of trying to square the challenge to fitting an inherently creative process into the systems that emerged while we attempted to adopt agile processes, in my time there we learnt a lot, we had some success and some areas where we obviously needed to learn more, so I was delighted to hear a very thoughtful presentation from the perspective of someone who it seems has worked with quite a few teams implementing agile in a variety of flavours. ... (more)

Cambridge usability group - UX and agile

Sophie Freiermuth(@wickedgeekie)) from Baguette UX gave tonight’s talk on how lessons learnt from operating as a UXer within an agile environment. I thought it was a great talk. When at Mendeley we always faced the problem of trying to square the challenge to fitting an inherently creative process into the systems that emerged while we attempted to adopt agile processes, in my time there we learnt a lot, we had some success and some areas where we obviously needed to learn more, so I was delighted to hear a very thoughtful presentation from the perspective of someone who it seems has worked with quite a few teams implementing agile in a variety of flavours. ... (more)

Communicating better, moving from virtualenv to vagrant/Chef

I’ve been using virtualenv for a while, but in the past few months, since taking up the role of head of technology for eLife, I’ve been giving much more thought about how to build scalable development environments. Ever since I was managing connotea, one of the biggest pains has been configuration management. I seem to have spent almost more time on configuring environments than on actually doing any development work (disclaimer, I don’t actually do much coding, I usually do more product management, but it’s really useful to know the development pain points). ... (more)