Digital Ninja

Tonight I had one of those priceless "Ah-hah!" moments that we all seek in life. But this time I'm actually a shade depressed. The cost of the epiphany was too high at a bad time.

Here's the scenario: I'm tearing through a freelance contract, trying to get it finished and out the door. Of course my perfectionism won't allow me to just wrangle together some code, and I haven't had the opportunity at the office (read: day job) to experiment with some of the technologies I'd like to explore. So this project was my great chance to advance my "mad skillz" as it were. My self-learned epiphany goes something like this:

1. Decide it's finally time to use Coldspring for the first time.
2. Spend about 4 hours trying to use Coldspring and my Squidhead output of DAO's, gateways, and business objects.
3. Eventually discover a helpful thread in the Coldspring Google Group that tells me in one simple phrase, "Don't use Coldspring to manage non-singletons."

That's it!ﾠ That one little line, a nugget of truth, is all I needed. But it took so loooooong to get there. I didn't know what questions to ask, how to even phrase what I wanted into a Google search term.

If I weren't trying to rush this project I suppose it wouldn't have been a big deal. This is not a good time right now for me to sacrifice hours of productivity. I sure wish I had a mentor, someone I could call or ask to look over my shoulder and take a look at what I'm doing. I could have Tweeted my problem, but by the time I understood the question I was able to Google it up for myself. Knowing the question to ask can be the most challenging part of it all.

These mentor-less epiphanies are getting expensive!

My goal with this blog is to help other folks find the tools and tricks that help me so much. Here's one that I'd like to plug. It's a project I found on RIAForge called Deployment Builder. It was made by the hands of developers (Rob Brooks-Bilson and Adam Crump are involved) doing exactly what my team and I are trying to do, which is ease the deployment process for projects from the source code repository to any environment, whether it's staging or production.

There are two things that might make you hesistate, if my guess is right. The first is, "that's a lot of power to put into a tool/application." You're right for thinking that. The fine folks who built this tool have jumped through some sophisticated hoops to make it very well secured IMHO. I endorse their efforts and applaud the result. Being that it's installed, not hosted out there somewhere, I feel very comfortable with the product in this regard.

The second question I'm guessing you'll ask is something like, "My infrastructure is complicated - it would be a nightmare to configure this into an application!" Yes, you might be correct here. I found, however, that this application will take you at least 60% there, depending of course on where "there" is. For me, "there" was telling Deployment Builder the tag in SVN I want to deploy, the server (configured as a name and FTP host) I want to send it to, and then click "GO".

Nothing will replace the human factor here, but I see a dramatic speed increase coming now for the team and an increased "nimbleness" entering play that will allow us to juggle entire versions of products we're staging, testing, and pushing to live. No, I still don't have my one button trigger to get that OneHugeApp(TM) onto the load-balanced ColdFusion pool, but I can in just a few clicks anyway. It's a start.

And it's open source, which means perhaps we can contribute to it to help get it where it needs to be to make those kinds of things happen in one click. My motto lately has been the constant mantra, "there is no original problem." Finding this tool was a reassurance of that mantra.