The Codebelay Blog

If you don’t fail fast enough, you’re on the slow road to success.

One idea that I recently failed was using a screen and sitebeagle to monitor sites.

It’s not a complete failure… it works okay.

Due to budget constraints, I put my screen and sitebeagle set up on a production server.

For some reason that production server ran out of space and became unresponsive. Screen no doubt caused this. I was alerted of the issue and did a reboot.

After the reboot, although Amazon’s monitoring tools told me the server was okay, the server was not. The MySQL database was in an EBS volume and needed to be re-mounted.

The solution I now have in place is still screen and sitebeagle. But I use another server with screen and sitebeagle on it to monitor the production server that gave me the issue in the first place.

It’s a question of who will monitor the monitors… in a world of web sites with few site users the answers pretty bleak. In the world of super popular commercial sites, the answer’s clear. The wisdom of crowds will monitor the web sites.

Hey folks, I might expand this into a larger article for either mashable.com or techcrunch.com .

I was wondering if you folks who are coders feel that you’ve been put in a situation where you are the lone coder in a sea of power users?

If so, is this situation ideal for you? Not ideal?

How do you deal with job queues?

How do you deal with working with power users with conflicting interests?

I’m really interested in war stories where you feel you’re the lone expert.

Cheers, Barce

I’ve pretty much come to rely on git to pull me out of any bad jams in the chaotic environment I work in.

One thing I’ve had to learn to do is cherry pick commits and package them under a tag in git.

Here’s how to do it if you were working with my newLISP project called Sitebeagle:

fork sitebeagle on this page

cd sitebeagle

git fetch –tags

git checkout 8f5bb33a771f7811d21b8c96cec67c28818de076

git checkout -b sample_cherry_pick

git cherry-pick 22aab7

git cherry-pick b1334775

git diff sample_cherry_pick..master

git tag leaving_out_one_commit

git push origin –tags

At this point, you should have a tagged branch that doesn’t have the commit with the change to the “2nd file.” The diff should look exactly like this:

diff –git a/test.lsp b/test.lsp
index 9cf1667..158b625 100755
— a/test.lsp
+++ b/test.lsp
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
#!/usr/bin/newlisp

; test tag test_a
+; cherry pick test 2

(load “sitebeagle.lsp”)
(load “twitter.lsp”);