Sunday, May 29, 2016

100 years of peace

Probably the positive attitude and the entrepreneurial spirit in Romania will arrive after 100 years of peace. Relative peace. No massive war, no empires, to land raptures.

100 years of peace that should heal some wounds, make people build and capitalise what they built both materially and spiritually.

  

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Tooling in startups

What tooling does a startup need? Where should this tools be hosted in order to be accessible yet cheap?

Well the 1st choice is obviously the "cloud". GitHub and BitBucket are great for hosting source code.
They are not expensive and they offer offsite availability. So You cannot loose your code by using code in any case. If the company is, let's say paranoid about security, the only option I can consider is GitBucket a free Scala developed GitHub clone. GitLab or Gitorious are on the other hand just a pile of expensive junk. GitBucket does everything GitHub does and requires just a fraction of the resources that GitLab asks for. If pay the minimal fee on GitHub 7USD you are good to go with an almost perfect service. BitBucket services are cheaper but their interface is not as polished. Hosting your own GitBucket will go from 5 to 10 USD but there you can scale to as may users as you want paying just for some administrative talent.
 
The former mentioned tools offer VCS but they also offer wiki and issues trackers - maybe not as advanced as Jira or TFS but, heck, they are almost for free.

The second  category of tools is the build server. Here I couldn't find a decent online build provider, but with a little imagination one can have its own Jenkins either on OpenShift (albeit memory and storage limited - builds tent to take forever) or in even better in a cheap cloud server as these of Digital Ocean or Scaleway.  This means that you will pay from 0 to 10 USD to build services.

Then you need some productivity/office applications. IMO Google apps are just right for this.
GApps come almost in every domain name bundle and sometimes they can be largely discounted.
They also include GTalk/Hangouts and GMail - awesome apps for communication.
Additionally Slack can be used for team communication as their channels work as Google Wave was supposed to, offering a stream of information that anyone can join. Slack is also great for integrating services as it can be triggered or can trigger services that have a RESTful interface.

Summing it up a startup has to pay between 50 to 100 USD per mont for all its IT needs.

NB: In case that the shop is a Microsoft one - their alternative offering (Office 365, VS team services) is more than fair albeit it limits you to a Windows world.


Thursday, May 26, 2016

Interesting outages detection

What Microsoft thinks
What I see...

Sometimes the error message is even more verbose and involves a BE server id also....

Somethig as:
X-ClientId: 5..............................................7
X-Auth-Error: MServTransientException
X-FEServer: AM3PR03CA033
X-BEServer: DB4PR03MB0749
Date: 5/26/2016 6:10:38 PM