JoeJIRA.com created for Freelance Consulting presence

Work is great, and I thank God for my job and its present stability.  What tomorrow brings, I do not know, but in the here and now I want to make sure I am making the most of my talents and keeping myself diverse.  This blog has gone silent for years as I changed jobs and worked at an insane pace, learning and teaching.  

I have spent time a lot of time working with some of the smartest people I have ever met.  I have been awed, demeaned, humbled, and eventually praised and admired.  The experience of the past years has been so fulfilling.  It definitely has raised my mental standards and I now expect a lot from Software Engineers.  It comes as a continued shock when I see how far behind in terms of best practices most companies are.  I have learned many best practices from my colleagues, created several on my own, and am still fully cognizant that I have barely scratched the surface on process improvement and leading efficiency.  I have brought automation, improved workflows, transparency, and better communication to many different areas of the business; it is very satisfying to see how much of an immediate improvement I can make in the company and often provide a better quality of work for the team members themselves.CodeProject

Current circumstances thrust me into learning JIRA.  I had a wish list of ideas for the "professionals" we were going to hire to setup our JIRA instance.  I had workflows drawn out in VISIO and comments on how the approval flow should gate the releases before our CAB meetings reviewed them.  I, along with others on a team dedicated to new tool analysis, presented the proposed stack of tools to the COO and upper management.  We got the buy in to change to the more cutting edge stack, but when push came to shove and multiple consulting agencies quoted over $50k for basic setup, the support seemed to fizzle out.  The push for technology did not wane however, and I was the lucky winner (based on drive and ability) to self-learn JIRA administration and roll-out the tool-set myself.

It was touch and go for a while as I had to juggle my regular workload of Configuration & Release Management, but in the end we did manage to successfully migrate to the new tools and are continuously working to improve it, adding new teams to manage their own processes and workflows in JIRA.  As is usually the case from any saga, I am very thankful in hindsight for the new set of skills I learned.  My immersion in JIRA became a joke and some "wise" software developers began calling me "Joe Jira".  The name was catchy enough and the idea of taking these new skills out into the world for some freelance work got me thinking...

LONG STORY to basically tell anyone who stumbles here that I have created a new site called http://www.joejira.com in order to diversify myself with some freelance consulting off-hours.  Head over there for more info and let your friends know.  If anyone needs some shell scripting (bash or powershell), some Jenkins/Hudson CI setups, or some JIRA installation and workflow setup, send them my way.

CMS: Concrete5 CEO, Franz Maruna, Stops By For A Visit

In our last post, CMS: Joomla vs Concrete5 -- First Look, we reviewed an up-and-coming Web CMS called Concrete5 and compared it to the well established giant, Joomla.

We were very honored to have the CEO and Founder of Concrete5 stop by to read the review and join in on the discussion going on in the comments section. We also had the pleasure of the President and CEO of Trivera starting off the discussion and sharing his own experiences with Concrete5.

It's great to see that we not only have industry professionals giving us their opinions, but we even get those who are closest to the tool chiming in as well. Let's try to keep up this open communication as we do some more in depth reviews in coming posts!

CodeProject

CMS: Joomla vs Concrete5 -- First Look

I've been delving into the fun world of web design lately and have been trying my hand at using a Content Management System to make it easier. Turns out, using a CMS makes the website simpler in some ways, but adds its own complexities. As I'm working between the different CMS's, I think it would be worth sharing some top level opinions for those who are trying to decide between them.

All 3 systems are open source and typically freely available on most web hosting services. If not, they are easy enough to install. I am not going to look at that right now. Perhaps in later posts we'll drill down further into the differences, but for now, I am just looking at the admin interface.

I started with Joomla, since it is best known, discarded it, tried Drupal, discarded it, played with WordPress, liked it but discarded it, and finally hit upon the lesser known Concrete5. For a while, I had hit upon a gem, made my site, then as I tried to add a few features, I found myself limited. I then began my way backwards through Drupal and eventually found myself with Joomla again. Each have their strengths and weaknesses...

Concrete5 is phenomenal in terms of interface for contributors. Setting up the page is rather simple; take a template you like and insert just a few php statements, then upload it to the Concrete5 backend. From there, using the front end you can just click around on the page itself (when it edit mode) and do wyswig style edits. You can add blocks of text, html, images, flash content, etc. Once added, if you want to change the layout, you can just grab the blocks and rearrange them. There is version control as well! Each edit versions that page and you can roll back to other versions.

Joomla on the other hand is much harder to setup. The backend is not as simple or user friendly/intuitive. Editing content is not as visual and requires work in the admin console. Once you get used to it, Joomla can become easy, but adding/modifying content is nowhere near as easy as it is in Concrete5.

So why did I switch back to Joomla? Concrete5 fails when it comes to extendability and community support. As I wanted to add advanced features to my site, like eCommerce shopping carts, I found that Concrete5 couldn't compete with the other CMS's available. They did offer modules to extend Concrete5, but at a cost. Now, I pursued an Open Source CMS enticed by the no-cost solution, so hearing that I have to pay to extend it turned me off. Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress blow Concrete5 out of the water in this arena. Not to say they are all free...All of them have paid and free extensions/modules/plugins. The difference is there is usually a free version of everything and paid versions for more advanced/professional features.

Drupal is a little weak compared to Joomla in terms of eCommerce, so I glossed over it in my search and moved back to Joomla. WordPress was a very good solution too, but I discarded it since it really is designed for blogging sites. There are ways to use WordPress for a non-blog site, but I didn't want to force the circle peg into the square hole. (Side note: this blog is hosted on Blogger.com, not a WordPress site). Joomla finally fit the bill here.

I'll try to talk in more detail about the features later, but since this is a blog, I'll have to curb myself here from going on and on. My quick summary:

1. Concrete5 is great for simple sites with content contributors that are not too technically savvy.

2. Joomla is great for a lot of different tasks, very flexible, very powerful, but pays for this all with added admin complexity.

CodeProject

Learn with Lynda.com Video Tutorials

I don't share links often as this blog is really just for me to post tips & tricks I learn on the job, but this link is amazing. A coworker told me about www.lynda.com when we were discussing learning how to use video editing software. This website has excellent video training on almost anything you can think of. Basically any of the major multimedia or office software has extensive training videos available: Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Microsoft Excel, Access, etc. They even have programming languages like PHP, Python, etc. I signed up for the 7 day free trial (Google it and you will find a link) and after just 20 minutes of watching videos I was blown away at the possibilities.

The link I found for the 7 day free trial is http://www.lynda.com/promo/trial/Default.aspx?lpk35=197. That is at the time of this post, but no guarantees that it will still be valid when you try it. If not, just Google it: "7 day free trial lynda.com"

CodeProject

LINUX: Sub-shells

I mentioned sub-shells before and the way the affect aliases, but I did not talk much about the use of sub-shells themselves.  A sub-shell can be quite useful in scripting, either to isolate certain environments, or to run sets of commands in parallel.

Using them are simple:  Encapsulate the commands you want in a sub-shell within parentheses.

#!/bin/bash

( echo "Start sub-shell"
export ENVVAR="This is my sub-shell variable" )

echo $ENVVAR

The first thing you will notice when running this script is that the environment variable we set within the sub-shell does not propagate back to the script. The echo of $ENVVAR will be blank. Sub-shells are unidirectional; they use one-way passing of the environment, so it can inherit your current environment, but will not give back anything. This is very useful if you need to do multiple things that all require separate environments.

#!/bin/bash

( echo "Start sub-shell 1"
echo $ENVVAR
export ENVVAR="1"
echo $ENVVAR )

( echo "Start sub-shell 2"
echo $ENVVAR
export ENVVAR="2"
echo $ENVVAR )

( echo "Start sub-shell 3"
echo $ENVVAR
export ENVVAR="3"
echo $ENVVAR )

From the output, you will see that the ENVVAR set in one sub-shell does not carry over to the other. Each environment is isolated. This technique can be used if you are doing multiple code builds in parallel, each with their own development environment, variables, compilers, etc. As it stands, the above executes each sub-shell serially, running one then the next. How about running in parallel? Add an ampersand "&" at the end of each sub-shell to indicate backgrounding the whole block.

#!/bin/bash

( echo "Start sub-shell 1"
echo $ENVVAR
sleep 2
export ENVVAR="1"
echo $ENVVAR ) &

( echo "Start sub-shell 2"
echo $ENVVAR
sleep 2
export ENVVAR="2"
echo $ENVVAR ) &

( echo "Start sub-shell 3"
echo $ENVVAR
sleep 2
export ENVVAR="3"
echo $ENVVAR ) &

I put sleep 2 in each block to slow it down so you can see the effects of backgrounding. What you will see is that it will execute all the echo commands to print "Start..." at the same time, then waits 2 seconds, then the numbers get printed later. The three sub-shells are running in parallel! Did you catch the problem in the above though? You were returned to the prompt prior to the script finishing. You received your prompt and then all the sudden, the numbers got printed out after. In order to tell the script to wait till all the sub-shells are finished before exiting the script, simply type "wait" at the end of the script. The final script will look like:

#!/bin/bash

( echo "Start sub-shell 1"
echo $ENVVAR
export ENVVAR="1"
echo $ENVVAR ) &

( echo "Start sub-shell 2"
echo $ENVVAR
sleep 2
export ENVVAR="2"
echo $ENVVAR ) &

( echo "Start sub-shell 3"
echo $ENVVAR
sleep 2
export ENVVAR="3"
echo $ENVVAR ) &

wait

CodeProject

LINUX: Case Insensitive in VIM Editor

Just a quickie here. If you are in the VIM editor and want to search for a term, but do not want it to be case sensitive, type ":set ic" enter. This tells VIM to treat UPPER and lowercase the same.

CodeProject

Essential Effortless Efficiency

There's now a "lens" over on Squidoo that is geared towards collecting different technical time-saving tips from the community.

Head on over and contribute: http://www.squidoo.com/work-smarter-and-faster