Tutorial – How to build your own website using HTML and WordPress

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I have published a set of workshop notes on Github called Build Your Own Website – A Beginner’s Guide, covering the basics of HTML and WordPress-driven websites. I gave the workshop at a recent Engineering Day event at thetrainline.com, where the audience was largely non-engineers from marketing/finance/HR etc., and it was interesting and useful to return to the first principles of HTML in ways accessible to novices.

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Cloud Deployments – Alex Papadimoulis at QConLondon 2013

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Alex Papadimoulis (@apapadimoulis) of Inedo (and TheDailyWTF) gave a really useful talk on deployments for cloud-based software systems at QConLondon 2013 recently [slides, PDF, 1.6MB].

He stressed the importance of finding the appropriate deployment (distribution + delivery) model for each application, and to keep deployments as simple as possible. In fact, we can follow the best practices from Continuous Integration and apply them to deployment.

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Comic Relief, @garethr, @LordCope, and CloudFoundry at QConLondon 2013

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I attended QConLondon 2013 last week; what I took from the first four sessions in the Building for Clouds track was: cloud API and infrastructure automation tools have now solved most of the ‘easy’ cloud problems, but harder challenges (such as automating clusters) remain. The sessions were from Tim Savage (@timjsavage) and Zenon Hannick (@zenonhannick) on Comic Relief’s unique challenges with performance testing, Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) on how to avoid PaaS lock-in, Stephen Nelson-Smith (@LordCope) on how to use Chef to give you ‘optionality’ with different cloud vendors, and Andrew Crump (@acrmp) and Chris Hedley (@ChristHedley) on the CloudFoundry cloud platform.

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What Makes an Effective Build and Deployment Radiator Screen?

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Build screens (or build monitors, or information radiators) are an important tool in helping to achieve Continuous Integration and in trapping errors early. When the number of build jobs becomes large, it can be tempting to hide ‘successful’ jobs to save space, but we found this to cause problems. I realised that people need to know the context for the red jobs if they are to take prompt action to fix failing builds, so it’s important to represent the full state of all builds by showing green jobs too.

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How HTTPbis changes HTTP caching, and why CDNs are not always the answer

Posted on by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

HTTP caching is a key part of what makes the web usable, and draft standards like HTTPbis add further refinements to the existing HTTP/1.1 caching features. At WebPerfDays 2012, Mark Nottingham (@mnot) and Josh Bixby (@joshuabixby) gave some useful tips on how we can tune our web applications to take advantage of the existing and forthcoming HTTP cache features.

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