In our latest set of Sledgecasts I work through the problem of merging k sorted lists. I eventually converged on the optimal solution except I did not perform it in place. Merging linked lists can be done in place without any allocation which can make a big difference if you are allocating an entirely new list each time you merge.
Jenkins has been a stalwart aid in all of the CI/CD projects I have worked on. Jenkins’ ease of use and plethora of plugins make it useful for almost any project and situation. From a build tool to a job scheduler Jenkins can solve your problem. But as with any good tool Jenkins has its drawbacks. For Jenkins the issue that gets me is that configuration is not stored in a git compatible format. If I change a job configuration there is no way to rollback the change or even determine what the previous state was. If multiple teams have access to Jenkins your build server could go down with no means of rolling back a change on the whim of another team’s wannabe system administrator.
Jenkins Pipelines are the Jenkins solution to storing job configuration in source control, but that is only for job configuration. Plugin configuration is still updated manually and easy to lose. It does make me wonder if we could make the /var/jenkins folder a git repository and just ignore the job history directories.
While Jenkins pipelines are nice, I don’t want to code my entire build. I just want my changes stored in a git compatible format so I can easily roll them back.
I also want to be able to mix and match pipeline stages with a standard stage interface for artifacts. Jenkins Pipelines allow me to mix and match ‘functions’ from a shared library, but not stages. Spinnaker purports to handle pipelines well, but it require me to run 10 different micro-services just to get started. That is not a replacement for Jenkins, maybe if Spinnaker was hosted by a 3rd party, it would be convenient enough, but Jenkins is free to setup.
I will be using Jenkins today, but tomorrow I will have to start looking at alternatives.
Sledgeworx has completed our first Getting into Software interview with Craig Freeman. We discuss how Craig got into software, his career and the pros and cons of being a software engineer.
I have been reading ‘Software Estimation’ by Steve McConnell which is about estimating software projects. I got interested in the subject a few months ago, because my interns were asking questions about how to estimate stories in Agile ceremonies. The company I work at does not have any estimating theory. Its a shoot from the hip, ‘wild ass guess’ environment. I didn’t really have a good answer for the interns.
A couple surprises are that research has shown software engineers typically underestimate tasks to the tune of about 30% of the actual time and that the range of estimation accuracy is around 1.2-16x.
Sledgeworx is happy to announce the release of the Code Review Handbook. The Code Review Handbook contains everything I know about Pull request reviews and reviewing code.
