#production deployment

Real talk: I wasted months gluing together Jupyter notebooks, Airflow configs, and random bash scripts into something I called a 'pipeline.' It worked — until it didn't.

The turning point came when a colleague pointed me to Dataflow.Zone. Not because it promised magic, but because it gave me a single place to define our Python environment, schedule jobs, and push to production without juggling three different DevOps tools.

digesting

We’ve talked about Stack Overflow’s architecture and the hardware behind it. The next most requested topic was Deployment. How do we get code a developer (or some random stranger) writes into production? Let’s break it down. Keep in mind that we’re talking about deploying Stack Overflow for the example, but most of our projects follow almost an identical pattern to deploy a website or a service.

I’m going ahead and inserting a set of section links here because this post got a bit long with all of the bits that need an explanation:

Source & Context The Human Steps Branches Git On-Premises The Build System

What’s In The Build?

Steps 1 & 2: Migrations

Step 3: Finding Moonspeak (Translation)

Step 4: Translation Dump (JavaScript Edition)

Step 5: MSBuild

Step 6: Translation Dump (C# Edition)

Step 7: Importing English Strings

Step 8: Deploy Website

Step 9: New Strings Hook

Tiers  Database Migrations Localization/Translations (Moonspeak) Building Without Breaking

Extra resources because I love you all

GitHub Gist (scripts)

GitHub Gist (logs)

insightful comments on HN. Here’s one from taurath

How people manage git and source control tells you a lot of things about a company's culture. They said that most commits go directly onto master and this works for them, which indicates:

- Good rapid communication about who is working where. People are generally not touching the same code or else you'd run into frequent collisions (solvable via rebasing of course but they would be doing more branching if it were a thing to happen very frequently I'd suspect)

- The developers are given autonomy and have assumed some level of mastery over whatever their domain is. Trust in each developer's ability to commit well-formed and considered code.