Logical Decay

Been making steady progress on Project Chronos this week. There will be a new blog post here soon with some details on status. For tonight though I just want to mention a couple neat products I’ve started working with.

Hoptoad

The first is Hoptoad, it is a rails service for tracking application errors. It aggregates error, tracks what deploys they’ve happened with, and integrates nicely with Lighthouse and GitHub (in the pay versions). It also sends you a notification email the first (and only the first) time a new error occurs. The integration though isn’t at all required to appreciate the app. It makes it incredibly convenient to track what types of things are going wrong, and how frequently they are occurring. We have some in house tools designed to do this kind of thing at Nexopia, but nothing as polished. The best part about it is from the time I decided to install it to the time I had completed integration was under 2 minutes.

New Relic

The second cool new service I found is New Relic, recommended to me by @tvongaza after I mentioned my pleasure with Hoptoad. New Relic does performance monitoring for your app. Measures the time it takes to complete a page, the cpu load, database load, etc. It also has a very nice development mode that lets you drill down into the details of individual transactions on your development server. It has a free version that is available for unlimited hosts, but it doesn’t include the full feature set of several quite expensive pay versions. The feature set of the free edition is still excellent, it can be a bit annoying to see the constant reminders of features you can’t use though.

Between these two excellent services and my recent adoption of GitHub, I am feeling pretty happy about my developer tools now.

I’ve been doing version control for project chronos with git. Since starting with git I’ve been looking for a good project management/source code repository site that was free. For awhile I was using project locker, they provided Trac integration but other than that had about the worst UI I’ve ever used. After a round of frustration trying to find the URI to clone my repository from, I decided it was time to look for an alternative.

What I found was Indefero. It is also free up to 25MB of storage, has a relatively friendly if spartan UI, and is open source so if you’d like you can install it on your own servers. I was very impressed. I figured I’d roll with the hosted version until I hit my cap and then install it on my own server. Sadly it was lacking one key feature: multiple ssh keys per user. I use several computers, each has its own public ssh key, and I really don’t want to go around synchronizing them all. I also don’t want an account per computer. This was kind of a show stopper for me. I did some reading and it looks like a patch is available that overcomes this problem, and will presumably make its way into the hosted version at some point. I decided though, as is often the case, that it wasn’t worth the time I was spending trying to get something for free.

I’ve used GitHub in the past for open source projects. It is a wonderful product. Incredibly straight forward, it “just works”. $7/month got me their micro plan which covers all of my current needs and I don’t have to worry about what to do with my code anymore.

If you’re looking for something free and willing to spend some time on it I recommend Indefero. If you just want to get on to development and don’t mind a small fee (or free for open source), go with GitHub.