In my previous post, we looked at the pain of changing 100 different Jenkins jobs manually when most of them need the exact same change. In this post, we will explore a way of preventing that from happening by using some infrastructure. Namely, a domain specific language called Job DSL to create and manage our jobs. […]
Posts from October 2017
Using Regex to Change Jenkins Jobs
In my previous post, we looked at the pain of changing 100 different Jenkins jobs manually when most of them need the exact same change. In this post, we are going to see one way of preventing that by using a regular expression to change the job configuration files on the server. How Jenkins Stores […]
Jenkins Jobs: When Automation Goes Wrong
So You Created Your First Jenkins Job… For those that are unfamiliar with Jenkins, it is software that makes it easy to setup a continuous integration server with a web front-end. A ‘job’ or ‘project’ on Jenkins is something that usually builds or tests code, although it can do a lot of things you normally […]
Worker Autonomy Promotes Automation
At the suggestion of a colleague, I have recently started reading a book called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. If you are interested in this post and want to learn more about employee motivation, the book can be found here: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Daniel Pink makes the […]
Using Procomm ASPECT Script to Verify FPGA Fix
In one of my previous jobs, we had an issue with an FPGA that caused our product to not boot at cold temperatures. Ironically, this is not that different from my current job, where we also test our products over a varying degree of temperature ranges. The process for the previous job went like this: […]
The Dangers of Refactoring Legacy Code
Refactoring legacy code can be dangerous. There is no automated way to verify changing that code doesn’t break something. The person that wrote the code may not be at the company, or he doesn’t remember what it does. It uses old technology that is difficult, and people don’t have expertise with it anymore. So when […]
The Good Programmer Paradox
If we lived in a perfect world… Good programmers would be recognized and rewarded with interesting projects/better pay/etc. Bad programmers would not get those benefits. Perhaps I should better define what I mean by ‘good’ and ‘bad’. By good, I mean developers that follow good programming practices. Use unit tests Perform code reviews As a […]
Jenkins Job to Automate SVN Tagging
In my previous post, I gave a high-level overview of a Jenkins job that could automate creating SVN tags. In this post, I’m going to give more details on exactly how this is done. This job makes the assumption that the tag is always created from the trunk. Now obviously, this isn’t ideal in all […]
Using Jenkins to Automate Our SVN Tagging
Why Use Jenkins to Tag in SVN? I have used SVN in a couple of my jobs so far. In both locations I have used it, I created a job in Jenkins to help us do some relatively simple things in SVN (such as tagging). While the process of tagging is not that difficult, there […]