Written by , on in News.
It's been a while, and summer is here! Summer sales are literally right around the corner, and this episode brings news of our doings over the spring. You can listen to this month's episode below or read the transcript.
...Written by on in News.
We've created a server status page to easily reference how our servers are doing. This is a public view into our own UptimeRobot monitoring tools, and if we know about an outage that will last much time at all, we'll try to post news on that page. If you're having ...
Written by on in News.
Welcome, winter! We're cozy in this little nook of time between holidays, and are happy to be back in front of our mics. You can listen below or read the transcript.
...Written by on in News.
We're back in action! Listen to this month's episode below or read the transcript online.
We cover a few topics:
Written by on in Development, Retrospective.
Part of our work to make Exploit: Zero Day easier for us to maintain and update was making a job editor for ourselves. Previously, we'd been creating jobs (the storyline missions for the player) using the Django admin interface, which is very nice but makes it difficult to have a ...
Written by on in News.
Listen to this month's episode below or read the transcript online or as a PDF.
We talk about:
Written by on in News.
This month, we talk about the ongoing Exploit: Zero Day job editor development, the dropped "The Majesty of Colors" trademark application, our infrastructural/devops change away from Compass, and the upcoming Rosette Diceless one-shot session on September 30.
Written by on in Development.
This is the fifth part in a series on applying devops principles and practices to game development. You can read the first post in the series, and see the entire series under the devops in game dev tag.
In our post on what the devops philosophy is, we wrote about revisiting workflow annoyances periodically. Sometimes you get more time and/or money. Sometimes you learn of an easy way to solve a problem.
There's something that got a lot easier for us recently: chatops.
"Chatops" is a trendy word for a subset of devops that focuses on streamlining work using extensible chatbots (e.g., Lita, Hubot, and Errbot) in team communication tools (e.g., Slack, HipChat, etc.). We use Lita on Slack, so I'll stick with those as concrete examples.
As a simple-but-nice examples, you might ask Lita to run an automated build for you, and it will connect to Jenkins and run the build you ask for. You don't need to leave Slack open a tab, log into Jenkins, find the job you need, and run it.
Something really important that well-implemented chatops provides is the ability to add context-appropriate information to conversations that are already happening.
...Written by on in Development.
We have about 12 different sites or parts of sites that could have outages and two of us to manage them. Some of these have been up for years, and some are newer. Some applications require special installation or debugging, and some must be on differently-configured servers.
When one of those goes down, we both need to know how to diagnose and fix it as soon as possible. So how do we manage that?
...Written by on in Development.
This is the fourth part in a series on applying devops principles and practices to game development. The first post in the series is here, and the entire series can be found under the devops in game dev tag.
In our post on retrospectives, we wrote about taking note of lessons learned (good and bad) after emergencies or breakpoints in your projectâafter you deliver a feature, or at the end of a sprint or some unit of time. But how do you know what a good breakpoint is? How do you actually incorporate what you've learned in a retrospective into your future work?
Through effective project planning.
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