Compensating for yesterday

After a streak of 26 days, the day after the sister of my girlfriend got married was the first one I missed. With the self imposed rules below, I’m compensating by doing 2 hours today instead of one.

Toughest day so far, since we were in the car from 10pm yesterday until 3pm today: 11 hours of driving mixed with 4 hours of resting. The suitcases have been unpacked, the washing machine is running. As the dust has settled I’m venturing into …

CRON job on PROD server to check git master for changes and build automatically

I already started this on day 27 but wasn’t successful so far.

Today I learned that you can easily check the exit status of the most recent foregrond server command.

This gave me the most insights: How to write a shell script that checks if git repository is up to date?

My current update script that I had to execute manually, originally written by my colleague Ben Bosman, always built and deployed the code, regardless on whether there were any changes on master. I now enhanced the start with:

git fetch origin
reslog=$(git log HEAD..origin/master --oneline)
if [[ "${reslog}" != "" ]] ; then

So that it becomes very light to run in cron.

Also found following way to execute the update script in a way that the timestamp gets added in front of every line of the output

How to add a timestamp to bash script log?

$HOME/scripts/update.sh | while IFS= read -r line; do echo "$(date) $line"; done >>$HOME/scripts/updatelog

On to the last piece of the plan, adding this script execution to cron so that it executes every 5 minutes. Never configured cron myself but heard about it in the office very often, as it’s a key component for DSpace Scheduled Tasks

Determining the right execution frequency is not trivial with cron configuration, but crontab guru makes it easier.

The execution works, but the problem is that even despite the fact that the git fetch for updates is successful, the “${reslog}” != “” check is currently failing, as it’s not picking up the updates.

Deploy bram-atmire.github.io site locally and upgrade

Managed to deploy the site locally, had to upgrade rvm, ruby and use the suggested answer on Upgrade Jekyll and Dependencies. Wrote this new blogpost directl in IntelliJ IDEA and also pushed the updates to the gemfile and the gem lockfile.

Day 30 Plan

• Investigate why the update script doesn’t pick up on the available update.

Future days - Analyzer.atmire.com work

• Change String based implementation of error message handling with types and objects, according to Antoine Snyers recent Atmire DevTalk.
• Change string based implementation of the different browse styles to an object, according to Antoine Snyers recent Atmire DevTalk
• Optimize my hideous methods for getItemcount and getRepoCount.
• Re-test the check if we return the right repository to a user who tries to add a new one
• Updating a repository: touch/change the base URL or not?
• Batch ingest: switch to newer add repository methods.
• WCAG testing against the start page to ensure it’s accessible for people who rely on assistive tools.
• Transition from plain CSS to SASS to make it prettier and learn about SASS at the same time
• Instead of the 5 minute cron job, look into a gitlab webhook that executes the update script on prod whever something is committed to master.

Future Days - other ideas

1. Switch to a different project: start working on DSpace 7 Angular
2. Setup IDEA so I can start editing these blogposts from there, instead of in a text editor
3. Developer productivity: Get my IntelliJ IDEA Shortcuts in order (CMD+1, CMD+/, …)

Future days - Jekyll http://bram-atmire.github.io/ site

• Make it prettier

Future Days - Atmire.com work

Investigate and work on search engine optimization (SEO) for the main atmire.com website.

Future Days - Learning just for learning

• CSS: Go through the fabulous CSS Diner

Sustainability - Raising the stakes - Looking for sponsors

I have raised the stakes by

• giving €100 to Charity:Water for every day I miss.
• asking people to sponsor me and to give an amount to a charity for each day I successfully complete

This way, every day would be a win. These are the rules that I’ll apply:

1. I can anticipate or fix a lost day by doing an hour extra the day before, or an hour extra the day after. In theory this means I can maximally compensate a streak of 2 missed days.
2. Goal is to have a steady frequency, so I can’t just do 8h on a sunday to get myself off the hook for the next 7 days.
3. Sponsor commitments are fully voluntarily: any sponsor can back out at any time.
4. My commitment is fully voluntarily: if I want to change the rules or back out, I can at any time.

This month, these are already days that will be very tough:

• Sep 14,15,16,17 - Abroad for a wedding
• Sep 27,28 - Supernova conference Antwerp

So that’s already a lot of exposure to potentially missed days.

I will raise the stakes this way and gather money for Charity:Water. Let me know if you want to sponsor me and for how much per completed day in September. September 1st is the first successfully completed day.

September tracking

Will only log the failed days here. No failed days so far.

Thanks to the following sponsors!

1. Jan & Hilde: €2 per successful day (Yes, these are my parents)