I dunno maybe don’t use a big complicated self-managed thing for this — Web platforms are oriented around requests. But every nontrivial web application needs a way to run code out of band. Maybe you need to process uploads, or maybe you need to send a membership newsletter on a schedule. The asynchrony problem is more open-ended than serving requests. You could set…

March, 2017 — Hello from Skyliner! We hope our Smarch newsletter finds you well. We have a bunch of new features and updates this month. If you’d like to chat about any of this, join our community Slack, or drop us a line. Application History Page We have debugged many an application bug by figuring out…

The internet is a big truck. It’s really hard to drive it backwards. — I’ve worked with deploy systems in the past that have a prominent “rollback” button, or a console incantation with the same effect. …

Slamming your fingers in the car door of life — Over the years I’ve been collecting examples of what I can only describe as non-transferable knowledge. These are all definitely huge mistakes, but no amount of counseling or thought leadership is sufficient to wave people away from them. You have to touch these stoves before you’ll believe that they’re hot. …

I regret to inform you that your code has to be deployed — Building a web application is a young and poorly-understood activity. Toolchains for building code in general are widely available, relatively older, and they also happen to be closest at hand when you’re getting started. The tendency, then, is to pick some command line tools and work forwards from their affordances. …

As of today, Skyliner will automatically publish deployment state for GitHub projects back to GitHub using the deployments API. You can use this with GitHub’s webhooks to automate tasks that need to occur during or after Skyliner deploys. An example of this might be running an integration test suite against…

Today I’m happy to announce a new pro feature on Skyliner: deploy holds. Using this feature you can indicate to your teammates that deploys should be paused, giving a reason for the disruption. The most common use case for this is when’s something’s wrong. Suppose some alerts have just gone…

I’ve been around long enough to see production releases done a few different ways. My first tech job began back when delivering software over the internet wasn’t quite normal, yet. Deployments happened roughly every 12 to 18 months, and they were unmitigated disasters that stretched out for weeks. When I…

I was speaking on a panel the other day that was handed the topic, “the challenges of balancing data-light product bets vs purely data driven incremental improvements.” Camille Fournier was also a panelist and wrote up her thoughts here. …