Sascha's Developer Corner

Let’s give OpenShift by RedHat Enterprise a shot shall we?

I’m using a CentOS 6.6 final workstation to do my settings.

Note: This article expects you to execute the commands as root, unless otherwise stated. You can also do sudo <command> instead when your user is in the sudoers file.

Preparation

First you’re in need to setup your SSH and add the RHC client tool. For that you need to install a set of ruby packages:

yum install ruby ruby-devel rubygems rubygems-devel rubygem-json rubygem-parseconfig

The rubygems-devel I added optionally onto it as experience has shown that many times, issues during configurations and setups lack some devel packages. ruby-devel however I installed after running into an issue with gem so may add this to the list of things you want to install.

The packages are found in the base and epel repository. I already had the epel repository added to my repolist from previous installations so no additional steps required here. May not get confused with the OpenShift documentation as they talk about adding repos / subscriptions through the yum-config-manager.

OpenShift Client config

Note: We progress as regular user from this point onwards.

Next up is the client configuration. You can enter the setup process via:

rhc setup

It’ll ask you for the OpenShift server you want to connect to. If you use your own, enter the custom domain you have, otherwise just hit enter if you use the OpenShift online service.

The setup will ask you for OpenShift username, password, and if the should upload the keys automatically.

There will be an .openshift directory in your users home directory where you can find all required files after the setup process.

You are all set. 

You may are running into the situation when you are able or forced to work from remote or from home.

Working from home can be a big improvement in the quality of environment for a few people, but also have some nasty stumble stones on the road to successfully tackle the challenge what is home office.

#1 Plan more lunch time

You will most likely make use of the fully functional kitchen in your home to save money and food expenses. This is a wonderful opportunity to cook more and healthier and overall improve your quality of life when working from home. But cooking does cost time and you should incorporate and appreciate that you will spend more time preparing your food - therefore spend more time on your lunch.

#2 Have fixed breaks

When working from home, you’ll suddenly find yourself not needing to move as often. You may bring a bottle of soft drinks to the table, you don’t go out for lunch, you don’t have to go to another floor to prepare your tea / coffee. You overall will move less. When your job is all about sitting, this can be rather harmful so plan in to take fixed breaks at a good time, stretch your legs and may even plan in a walk in the afternoon.

#3 Have a distinct working computer

If you are prone to procrastination or get easily distracted, you should really not do your business and work on your private computer. Risk is there that you will just click on that game or open that tab which really has nothing to do with your work. Have a separate, distinct working environment which does only allow you to do what you are paid for.

#4 Reorganize your desk

When working from home, you have to consider that you will spend a substantial amount of time at your desk if that is your primary area of work. Your desk should be as comfortable and organized as if you where in an office environment. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun with it and put up little minifigures and collectibles all around the place, but have it so that you do have a good distance to monitors and keyboard, can move the mouse freely, not being obstructed by food and places and leftovers. Keep it neat and make sure to sit comfortable.

#5 Beware of social isolation

Whilst you may just be sitting there with your headphones on and not really talk a lot with your colleagues, it is a difference of having people around you which make noises, irritations and you are able to just quickly turn around and have some small talk over a cup of tea and not having anyone around. A lot of people may underestimate the isolation which your own home may brings and how this impacts on your as a person if you don’t have regular chats and people to talk to.

#6 Get your communication straight

Working from remote or home means you will have to pay extra care with your communications to your team mates and your superiors. Not seeing them and having a direct line of communication may impact on how certain things come across when they have to be done via text. You may experience that you don’t get the same level of information any more from people when you work from home rather than being in the same office. Make sure that you have a plan how to tackle communication gaps and how you are communicating with your team mates when working from home and remote. Think about what do you want to communicate through text and what is better done through a quick call / skype / teamspeak / ventrillo session.

That’s it for now. 

I’ve been looking at quite a few online project management tools over time. From self-hosted solutions such as Egroupware over Blossum to Asana.

The one which made it into my personal favourites, which I not only been using in the company but also for my own personal projects and things has actually been Asana.

I found that the simplicity in how to manage projects and tasks, specific sharing options and a little bit of customization has presented me with the solution required to resolve my project management issues at hand.

Asana makes task assignment simple, gives you a dashboard and project updates which notifies the project members as well and provides a nice calendar for overview of your tasks.

A few caveats which I’ve personally see are how tasks are presented in your own task list. If you are very task heavy and create a lot of sub tasks as well, you will eventually find your own task list cluttered with tasks. 

Whilst tasks can be grouped by “Today”, “Upcoming” and “Later”, you may will have 10-15 tasks and subtasks in today, 20-40 in upcoming and just an endless list in later (not displayed by default).

Another point which I personally just note down, which may not carry too much relevance to most people, is that asana completely relies on javascript. Whilst this is not an issue per say, if you work with development workstations which still can tend to have a bit more limited resources, and you have your usual hundreds of browser tabs open or you are in a place with a slower internet connection, asana can feel quite slow. Nothing of which I negatively view on them but something which did get noticed as I worked with it.

Considering the fact that I have not only used asana for business but also for private projects now only shows that the positive aspects of asana overweight the slightly negative ones by far and asana is up to today, my favourite project management tool.

May check it out - it is free with only very few limitations: http://asana.com

I have CentOS 6.6 running with a hand full of software collections.

I stumbled upon TOX, which is a neat little tool to test your python / django projects in a nice and efficient way. (django-webtests depend on that as well, which is why I installed it in the first place).

The issue

With CentOS 6.6, you will only have python version 2.6 installed on your machine. Using software collections to use python3.3 (used in this example) eventually will let you run into the issue that he can’t find the shared library for python 3 when running tox.

Installation

Just throwing together a little tox.ini file and installing tox through pip.

pip install tox

Configuration

The configuration file:

[tox] envlist = py33 skipsdist = True

[testenv] commands =      /path/to/project/.tox/python3.3 manage.py test deps = -rpip-requirements.txt setenv =     LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/rh/python33/root/usr/lib64

The solution

I have tried quite a lot of things, from trying to run the enable script in:

/opt/rh/python33/

over setting PYTHONPATH to enable the software collection permanently on my machine.

The solution in the end was not to configure anything but just to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

You can get the environment path via the following command:

env | grep LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Kudos to the RedHat Enterprise Support Forum as I have found a hint about this over there, in reference to a different problem.

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1198691

Conclusion

Sometimes you just need to be lucky.

Devcorner 2.0 brings back news and tech stuff - starting off with a new trend evolving around the video card companies and their lovers. 

People on twitter searching for #guyscuddlingwithvideocards and #girlscuddlingwithvideocards will be presented with a series of not only well known protagonists of the business sector but also with disturbingly nice images of girls and guys doing just what the hashtag would incline. 

Cuddling with video cards.

Kinda started by Jason (@killyourfm on Twitter) - things escalated quickly.

https://twitter.com/killyourfm/status/614216934083575808

Will I join in? I don’t think so. Is it kinda disturbing in an awesome way? Hell yes! 

It has been ages since I’ve published an article and for all who are coming over from my work and know the articles written on Stickyboard, this will not be big news.

As one of the upcoming projects in the company I work for will include changes around our platform, I got the permission to re-publish the articles I’ve written in the past for the company over here on the devcorner. Since they are all tech and web, I thought that could be a nice piece of work to take what was there and slightly adjust to make it workable.

We’ll be going through Web technologies and a couple works about frameworks and post a series of 6 articles over the course of the next few weeks. Pending on the workload, those will be published sooner or later.

We all know the thrill.

You start to write a web application / website / platform together with your mates or co-workers, the website goes through a batchillion iterations and by the end of the day you need a manual just to barey be able to find the things which you are looking for.

This at least is one of the impressions I get when I see certain web developer or frontend devs work or talk about the work. It doesn't matter how it's done as long as it works.

Let's bring in a little bit software development prospective.  Root of your project should be like your home. Neat, arranged and clean. No trash, no unnecessary items. It should please you when you look at it and if you find something you should be able to find it without hours of work.

We can apply the simple house holding rules to projects as well and their assets. As of my personal taste, I might as well over-structure some of the parts but to be quiet frank, less is more but not enough is simply not sufficient.

Let's have a look at the html templates shall we?

As of my personal taste I like to give the template folder a clean structure. Main files including the parts which are necessary from a different folder, which eventually, depending on the depth contain another folder or folders to categorize where the include is comming from. E.g. having alot of content based templates or snippets? Create a content folder within the include. Having things like navigation with their own different little bits and bobs? Hello navigation folder!

I think you get the idea.

Same goes for the css/less files.

Rather than having one huge less file which then results in a few thousand lines of less code to search through, you might as well want to split the parts up into nav, content, ... .

Definitions of mixins and colors or even font sizes and such, if generalized for the project may receive an own file in which you can easily adjust your settings and just port them over to another project without having to touch the main files defining your design.

Less is offering neat little functions to adjust colors and saturation of such or darken and whiten them in different ways which allows a fast creation of alot of different shades of one color. You might as well make use of such and just define your base colors at the top and then inherit and change from there on.

Those are just some very basic ideas and infos which can be used. I'll go into more details another time when I might as well publish another blog piece about web development but for now this is it.

The most comprehensive listing of websites that are powered by Django, the python web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.

If you came across Google Wallet lately, you might also came across JSON Tokens and the signing of them. 

If you are working with python, then here's a package you might want to take a look at. I proudly present:

PyJWT

This lovely creation was developed by progrium and gladly published under the MIT Licence and with that, free to use and modify as your little developer heart desires. 

I've used it myself in the past and I can say, it's very simple to work with. If you plan to integrate anythin which makes JSON token signing necessary, that's the way to go from my very personal opinion. More specificly if you work with google wallet but still, you might use it for something else and feel equally pleased.

I don't know how you feel but to start off the spotlight series with a tripple-insight-joke/reference might be a bit over the top. Anyways...

Today in the spotlight - django! Not really a package nor a library, but I also will introduce you guy's to frameworks and more!

Django is a webframework written in python for python by python. Pretty pythonic eh? Ok, enough with the southern slang. 

Django comes with the good'ol'battery included mentality, build-in admin which you can bend to your will and certainly makes you do some good rapid programming. Sweet integrated filters for your templates to help out with the ods and ends (e.g. text truncation, ...) and from my experience, I'd say as new programmer friendly as the python language itself.

Needless to say that you can write python method's and classes to help out with your logic, is it?