Scott Coldwell talks about “Managing an international team, Git, CFML, Node, Joomla, Headaches and Heartaches” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

Scott is one of the speakers of the upcoming Into The Box ColdFusion Conference, where he will talk about Managing an international team, Git, CFML, Node, Joomla, headaches and heartaches.

In his ITB talk, Scott shares how source control is the cornerstone of any substantial codebase, but managing incoming changes and getting them out the door can be complicated, time-consuming, and frustrating.

"You know developers are so anxious to get started on things and they just jump right in and sometimes Source Control is seen as a second-rate thing and, but I gotta tell you it's just crazy not to use it. It is absolutely critical. Even for a one-man show to have things in source control, to have a good history of what you've done, and to have those backups and the possibility to deploy in an automated way. I just can't imagine not having source control on every single project that I work on." - Scott Coldwell

Episode highlights

Why is source control critical for all ColdFusion developers

How to best manage lots of incoming changes via Git and keep aligned with your business process and release cycle

Lessons from the trenches on working with multiple teams, in multiple time zones, multiple countries and multiple programming languages (CFML, PHP and Node)

Avoiding Deployment Day Disasters

Project management war stories

Why are you proud to use CF?

WWIT (What Would It Take) to make CF more alive this year?

Conferences, podcast

The Modern Face of CFML

What are you looking forward to at Into The Box?

Source control is the cornerstone of any substantial codebase, but managing incoming changes and getting them out the door can be complicated, time-consuming, and frustrating. In git, where branching is a first-class operation, we'll look at tried-and-true strategies to manage code changes, and see how those strategies align with business processes and release cycles.

Working with one team is tough enough, but with multiple teams, in multiple time zones, countries, different programming languages, cfml, php and node things get even more complex. I have worked in this environment, working through some tough lessons, and learning a lot on the way.

Join me as I tell you a few stories, and give you some strategies for dealing with your project, no matter how small, or big and complex it is.

Mentioned in this episode

Git stashing - a local commit off to the side and come back to it later

Git commit without push

Git branching and merging

Project release cycle/ Sprint

3 weeks total

2 weeks development + 1 QA/bug fix/plan next release

Plus release notes

The good cadence of the cycle

Agile methodology

Daily scrum meetings

Scrum master helps with good communication within team and developers staying focused on tasks

Challenge of defining tickets before start coding

His project tools

Notification only during certain times

Seamless between computer, web and phone

Helps keep things moving

Channels to organize communication

Mute channels not interested in but @ mentions still

Better team orientation than Skype. Better feature than HipChat

Slack

Jira bug tracking

Confluence wiki

Sourcetree and bitbucket

Beyond compare - side by side comparison - can hide what you define as “less important” changes, can find

Sublime code editor - multiline edit, quick selections, nice themes

Core meeting time for all teams

Deployment process

The enemy of reliability is complexity

“I didn't have time to write a short program, so I wrote a long one instead.” with hat tip to original quote about writing letters by Mark Twain

Ticketing system - track bugs, hotfixes and change requests

Gitflow