Setting up Hubot with a gTalk account for fun

This article should be called like something like “Be happy: put a robot in your life”, deep down in order to represent better what I will explain here I’ve changed the title to a more technical point of view.

Since I’ve started to work in Openhost I always thought that for creating a good product our developers (and me between them) should have a great atmosphere, in order to do that I would rather have a pleasant workflow than a strict one. So I’m a firmly believer of Gamification of work. We  were using Jenkins for doing Continuous integration and quickly integrated the Jenkins Continuous Integration Game, a tool which allowed us to create contests for improving our code base without even thinking about it, just thinking on getting a high rate in the contests. But, this is something to another post.

As we are continuously telecommuting, we use groupware chats as our main way of communication. This week I came across to something called Hubot, it’s some sort of chat bot with incredible scriptable capabilities. In a brief description, it is a program that can connect to your groupware chat and it can accept orders, run them in the server and get some response to them in return.

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Solving caching issues with Vagrant on vboxsf

Since some months I’ve been working with Vagrant as a tool for provisioning my production-like environment to develop Opennemas. Vagrant is a really powerful tool for automating the creation of environment that mimic your production stack without having to deal with configuration files.

In fact this task, automatic provisioning machines, was one of the most important tasks in order to reduce our technical debt. But anyway, let’s move to the topic of this article.

We use Ubuntu OS as a guest VM provisioned by Vagrant+Virtualbox and we share our project code with the guest machine through vboxsf. Inside that machine, among the rest of the stack, it’s running Nginx (but this issue will be present regardless the web server you are running).

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Steps toward modernizing a legacy codebase

Paul M Jones presented at the Nashville PHP User Group on August 13th, 2012 on modernizing legacy code.

“We’ve all been there, dropped into a codebase that makes perfect sense to the original developers but might as well be Greek to you. Paul will help you make sense of things with some helpful tips for untangling the spaghetti and how to move it towards a more modern, modular architecture while keeping it running the whole time.”

Thoughts on working from home

In the last month seems that the main topic to talk about among IT start-ups is telecommuting. It all started when the actual Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer announced that all company employees must start to work at the same place:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side by side. [...] Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, [...] Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

There are some reasons why those arguments could be right. While being at the same place, people tend to have closer and quicker work relations and this could speed up some projects, but this comes with some drawbacks like coworkers distractions when you need to keep focus on your duty, spending time going to the Office, ….

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