Our IT / infrastructure guy is going on vacation.  Left behind a cheat sheet for his backup to help him understand how best to assist our team with Git…  LOVED his notes as to how to help team members who approach with questions or challenges with using Git (distributed version control system, otherwise known as ‘let all of work on code together’).  Catch his last bullet and tell me that he doesn’t get how to motivate software developers…

“I broke Git again/I don’t understand Git/Tell me how to use Git/What is Git/Git? Is that like a potato?”
First, if they don’t seem to understand the fundamentals of Git, ask them if they’ve read Chapters 1-3 of the Git Book: http://git-scm.com/book

If they haven’t, make them read it before continuing. Git can be complex and if they don’t know the fundamentals you will have to hold their hand through everything, and they will likely end up breaking something.

We also have a Confluence page with a bunch of helpful Git links and examples: Git Resources

If they are still confused, feel free to question their man/womanhood. Just do it nicely.

This is all after a tutorial, a few guidance emails, instructions available on our wiki (Confluence instance)…  He’s done a great job bringing the team along in its transition from Subversion (a different version control system which has a different model) to Git.  So now “if they are still confused, feel free to question their man/womanhood.”  But “do it nicely”….

Had reason to sign up for an Amazon S3 account yesterday to use as a download area for the anticipated spike in traffic to our project in the very near term. Was amazed that:the following set of steps worked so amazingly well:
– the site had me give it some info, including a phone number
– site told me it was going to call, and that I need to punch in a pin # it put up on the screen there
– I got an automated phone call and entered that pin
– as soon as I got off the phone, the site updated itself to say that it was creating my S3 account structure.

Amazing! Web site synched with autodial phone system which (I think) had its message crafted based on my info which then synched back to the web site’s back-end server to do finish processing and do a server push out to the site itself saying that the transaction had completed. Excellent user experience: no time lapses seen and my account got created seamlessly. Very cool use of multiple technologies, done breezily on the part of Amazon.

I’m trying to use a class within Grails. Specifically, I want to use one of their Codecs classes that comes within Grails itself to let me build a tool to encrypt a password, so that I’d then be able to set up their Codecs to use to decrypt / use within the application, so that I’m not storing an unencrypted database password. Grails provides Codecs – should be “easy” to use them, rather than needing to write my own. Cryptography is one of of those areas that causes code reviewers to grow concerned, in terms of releasing code out into the wild, so being able to point to making use of an existing class would have been highly helpful. However, in attempting to use a static encode closure, getting all sorts of muck which I’d need to include in the classpath, etc. Grrrrrrrrrr….