henry sztul

mwunsch:

Welcome to Warp Zone!
Warp Zone is an internal tool I’ve developed for our Front End team here at Scripps Networks Digital. I had a bit of fun designing and building it.
Here’s what it does:
Our development process has gotten more and more painful as our team grows and as development initiatives increase. A small team of us have taken on improving our workflow surrounding release cycles. We reached a bottleneck when we went to deploy to the main Development environment (big-D development as opposed to a local environment). Simultaneous development projects were going on that touched many different teams and, as a result, each developer was competing to view their work in the main Development environment. This resulted in lots of overwritten code, shaky expectations, etc. We decided that we needed some sort of switchboard that managed what branch of development the environment was pointing to.
While brainstorming that concept, I mentioned something about numerous “pipes and levers” that controlled where Development was pointing to. I took the metaphor a bit to far. The result is Warp Zone, our internal switchboard for managing development branches.
Here’s how it works:
Up at the top (the “score”), you have the current configuration. You can see who last changed the environment, what branch the environment is pointing to, what environment is being controlled, and how long the environment has been set to point to this branch.
The pipes represent the different branches of development. Hovering over them reveals some info about the last revision, and clicking on that takes you to the internal instance of ViewVC to get more information about that revision. Clicking the pipe opens up a modal to enter in your employee id, which you need to enter to throw the switch.
Once you submit, the symlink that the environment is looking at is switched to point to the new branch. You are literally (not literally) warping to a new branch of development.
Warp Zone is a simple way to manage a development environment with multiple, ongoing branches. It’s totally customized for what we’re doing on the Front End team, but maybe if it proves interesting to others I’ll work on abstracting it as a general purpose tool.
It’s still in development and experimental, but I think it’s a good first step to improving our process.
Also, it’s Mario Bros. themed. You can’t go wrong with that.

Welcome to Warp Zone!

Warp Zone is an internal tool I’ve developed for our Front End team here at Scripps Networks Digital. I had a bit of fun designing and building it.

Here’s what it does:

Our development process has gotten more and more painful as our team grows and as development initiatives increase. A small team of us have taken on improving our workflow surrounding release cycles. We reached a bottleneck when we went to deploy to the main Development environment (big-D development as opposed to a local environment). Simultaneous development projects were going on that touched many different teams and, as a result, each developer was competing to view their work in the main Development environment. This resulted in lots of overwritten code, shaky expectations, etc. We decided that we needed some sort of switchboard that managed what branch of development the environment was pointing to.

While brainstorming that concept, I mentioned something about numerous “pipes and levers” that controlled where Development was pointing to. I took the metaphor a bit to far. The result is Warp Zone, our internal switchboard for managing development branches.

Here’s how it works:

Up at the top (the “score”), you have the current configuration. You can see who last changed the environment, what branch the environment is pointing to, what environment is being controlled, and how long the environment has been set to point to this branch.

The pipes represent the different branches of development. Hovering over them reveals some info about the last revision, and clicking on that takes you to the internal instance of ViewVC to get more information about that revision. Clicking the pipe opens up a modal to enter in your employee id, which you need to enter to throw the switch.

Once you submit, the symlink that the environment is looking at is switched to point to the new branch. You are literally (not literally) warping to a new branch of development.

Warp Zone is a simple way to manage a development environment with multiple, ongoing branches. It’s totally customized for what we’re doing on the Front End team, but maybe if it proves interesting to others I’ll work on abstracting it as a general purpose tool.

It’s still in development and experimental, but I think it’s a good first step to improving our process.

Also, it’s Mario Bros. themed. You can’t go wrong with that.