Managing the Environment

This is a brief companion post to the talk I gave yesterday for Web Conference at Penn State 2014. The tagline for the conference was “the future friendly web”, and the talk covered how this web can be created with rapid, incremental improvements with defined workflows around version control, provisioning, deployment, and testing.

It’s a bit interesting that the talk links on the conference site don’t have dates in URL. Let’s see if that web remains future friendly. 🙂

Thanks to everyone that attended the talk, hopefully there were some good takeaways. Please reach out if you have any questions about any of this.

Slides: Managing the Environment – Web Conference 2014

Useful links from the presentation:

• http://wp.wsu.edu/platform/ – WSUWP Platform, the open source publishing platform we’re building on WordPress at Washington State University.
• http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ – GitFlow, a successful git branching model. For when you’re ready to get complex in your workflow.
• http://www.saltstack.com/community/ – The open source Salt provisioner.
• http://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-open-source – The open source Puppet Labs provisioner.
• http://www.getchef.com/chef/ – The open source Chef provisioner.
• http://www.ansible.com/home – The open source Ansible provisioner / automation tool.
• http://www.fabfile.org/ – Fabric is a python library for streamlining SSH use.
• http://www.vagrantup.com/ – Vagrant is magic, open source, and cross platform.
• http://virtualbox.org/ – VirtualBox is open source and cross platform virtualization software.
• http://git-scm.com/book/en/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks – Git Hooks documentation
• http://gruntjs.com/ – Grunt, the JavaScript task manager
• http://higheredsolo.com/newmodel/ – Michelle Tarby article that inspired WSU’s own open labs.
• http://web.wsu.edu/openlab/ – Open Lab recaps from WSU