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A little bit of Agile, a dash of Open Source, and a pinch of ITIL

Agile, Open Source, and ITIL

From left to right: Agile, ITIL, and Open Source: An (un)holy trinity?

So I’ve hopefully started what will become a multi-part series about integrating Agile, Open Source, and ITIL into an overall strategy for delivering web services. You can find the first part on my personal web site. WARNING:  The first post is simply a high, very high, overview of the three methodologies, so you may find nothing new in there.  Indeed, here’s a snippet speaking to that very fact:

First, an admission: Open Source, Agile, and ITIL are nothing new to the realm of IT; all have been around for years, if not decades, and many industries have embraced them in some form or another. So the fact we are now incorporating these practices into our work might not seem exactly novel and, if I was strictly speaking about incorporating just the individual practices into our work, such an assertion would be correct. But I’m talking about merging all three, and a quick Google Search on “implementing,” “incorporating,” “combining” or “merging” this trinity doesn’t exactly return a cornucopia of results. So maybe what were doing is somewhat novel, after all.

Posted in Agile, Development, ITIL, Open Source. Tags: , , , . Comments Off on A little bit of Agile, a dash of Open Source, and a pinch of ITIL »

Rendering templates obsolete?

There’s an interesting discussion on github today (courtesy of javascript weekly) about whether rendering templates and template engines in general are obsolete in today’s javascript-heavy applications. This topic seems to come up periodically, although the idea hasn’t really taken off. I think the first time I came across it was in the seaside framework, which is great by the way. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, so I’ll be interested to see how the discussion develops.

Posted in ATG, HTML, Javascript, Smarty. Tags: , , . Comments Off on Rendering templates obsolete? »

Github zip doesn’t include Submodules

Seriously, what were they thinking. This completely invalidates the use of submodules. We want our code to be available without having to know git. That’s the whole reason they have the download a zip link. But not including all of the code means you have to unzip the code and then use git to get the submodules.

Submodules are great for code reuse. But if I can’t intend my project to be downloaded by people that just want to install it and not code anything while using submodules. This is horrible.

Inserting images into Github’s wiki

This is something I was not able to find clear information on. Specifically, I wanted to add a flow chart I’d created to the wiki. I’ll also be adding an ER diagram later. It’s cool to have the important development documents somewhere where they can be accessed and perhaps edited from anywhere by anyone if need be. Github has a failing in this regard I think. They should have an interface for this.

The trick of it all is the wiki is itself a git repo. What you have to do is check out that repo. In my case, my project was https://github.com/jazahn/HarvardCards. To checkout that project, you would use the command:


clone git@github.com:jazahn/HarvardCards.git .

But that’s the project. The wiki is:

clone git@github.com:jazahn/HarvardCards.wiki.git .

So you have to check that out, add the image file to it, and then you can [[add the image]] via relative path image link. https://github.com/jazahn/HarvardCards/wiki/Flashcard-Flowchart

Posted in ATG, Flashcards, Git, Version Control. Tags: , , , . Comments Off on Inserting images into Github’s wiki »