I just published a new blog post on the Lyft Engineering Blog. It is the final post in a series discussing how our engineering team scaled developer productivity through several tactical changes to our development workflow.

My post is the final post in the series, and discusses how my team, Test Platforms, built high value, rapid Acceptance Tests, which exercise critical business flows from various parts of the Lyft lines of business.

Read my post here!

Read the entire series of posts here:

• Part 1 Scaling productivity on microservices at Lyft
• Part 2: Optimizing for fast local development
• Part 3: Extending our envoy mesh with staging overrides
• Part 4: Gating deploys with automated acceptance tests (my post)

I recently launched a new Rails app on Digital Ocean using Dokku. I wanted to pipe out my Rails log data to Loggly, and found the documentation on this to be pretty sparse.

This should capture the steps I took to set it up. These steps assume you have a working Digital Ocean droplet with Dokku 0.7.1 or newer, and Rails 5 (though it should work fine with other frameworks that can log to syslog).

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Toolbox

All skilled professionals have a "toolbox", right? An electrician might have a multimeter, screwdrivers, and a hammer. A painter might have brushes, pallets, paints. An engineer is no different, except that their toolbox is often entirely digital.

In all cases, tools help you to be more PRODUCTIVE, FASTER, and MORE ACCURATE in your every day work.

My developer toolbox is a set of customizations, tools, and applications that augment and improve the operating system and computer I use. I'll specifically cover changes and tools I use that help with developing computer software and websites.

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Have you ever wished github's awesome Atom text editor had better support for jumping straight to a class or method definition like Rubymine or Sublime Text? Me too! So, here's a short set of instructions how to get this functionality working on OS X!

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Update!

When I originally open sourced Colorpicker, it was a beautiful MVP based on some really nasty legacy code.

I haven't had the time to focus on this project extensively, but over the last year I've made a lot of important improvements and wanted to discuss them briefly in this forum.

I still have several longer term goals for this project, such as eliminating the need for the Arduino entirely so that anyone can run the client on any computer (with an emphasis on low-memory and disk space cases for usage with a Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, or other cheap computer).

I'm going to cover six new features added, but there are many more improvements I've made that you can see more about on Github.

Gratuitous Video Demo

 

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