Thursday, November 29, 2007

Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux and the git source code control system) will tell you that if you use Subversion you are an idiot. I won't go that far, but git certainly saved the day this morning.

Around 10am, our sysadmin was performing a small upgrade to our office filer when Something Went Wrong™. Our filer holds a lot of data, including the source code that us engineers work on all day long every day.

If this had happened two months ago when we were using Subversion for source code control, we would have been off to the bar for some 11am drinks with no access to our source code. And we would definitely have been unable to complete the big release we're planning for tonight ( 320 files changed, 6937 insertions(+), 1636 deletions(-) at present count).

With git, however, we simply designated Jonah's virtual machine as the new central repository and went about our business, pushing and fetching our commits from there, with essentially no productivity lost. Below you can see how the "origin" remote got stopped in its tracks, but we just continued developing inside remotes/jonah. When the filer (origin) gets back up, we'll just push there, remove our jonah remote, and live happily ever after.

New Feature: Fan Email Alerts

The much requested email alert option when an artist you're a fan of uploads new songs will be going in in tonights update. You can find this new option on your fan preferences page or when you become of new fan of an artist.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Newsletter for November 27th, 2007

A little late, but this weeks newsletter is out.

Read it here

Check out the blog post here.

Update for 11/26/07

Nothing too big last night. Mainly bug fixes. See below.

Additions:
Bug Fixes:
  • REC Alerts turned back on
  • Old friend confirmation page now has info on new system instead of erroring (http://amiestreet.com/friend/confirm/248171)
  • Fixed DB error in newsletter archives
  • View more fans of an artist now staying more up to date and faster
Found a bug? Send us feedback.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Its Back!

After almost a year, we've decided to bring back the Dev Blog. For those of you who don't know, I tried to keep this pretty up to date the first few months of Amie Street. As things went on, I just got too busy.


However, since the time of this last post, we've been making leaps and bounds on the development side of things, quietly trying to improve the service, try/create new technologies to meet our needs, and playing around with new toys. So much has happened in the last nine months, its incredible. We've added 5 of the greatest engineers in the world and got a real office (we've come a long way) .

So, whats the point of this? We'll try and keep some things scheduled regularly. In the next hour or so, we'll push out a fresh set of bug fixes to the production servers. Every Monday and Thursday, we'll post immediately after the update a list of bug fixes and improvements (in this case tomorrow morning). Tuesday and Friday, we'll also post a running list of upcoming bug fixes and improvements for the next update.

Here's a quick run down of what we'll be posting here:
  1. Talking about what new features we're working on
  2. Share some code tricks we've learned (whether thats javascript, PHP, Flex, Java, erlang, or oCaml)
  3. What its like in the office
  4. Our rants on technology, music, and everything in between

In general, the point is to give you a look inside, trade thoughts on music and technology, and build better tools for you all for finding, sharing, buying and selling your music and hopefully meeting some cool people.

Drop us a line and share your two cents. Is this description up to snuff? Are there other things you would like to see here? Should we stop this entirely and just got back to writing code? As always, it's up to you.