Continuous Improvement, Day 1: Hello, TeamCity!
Wow, is that post title an oxymoron? What was the tag line on my blog again? ;)
Today was the start of my journey on the road of Continuous Improvement. One of the big things I took away from acts_as_conference was “Just F***in Do It”. Or, put a little more eloquently by Corey Haines (who I later found out was paraphrasing Ghandi):
Be the trouble you want to see.
So, as it turns out, I’ve garnered a certain level of respect with my manager. Basically, my manager provided me with an opportunity to plant the seed of the ideas (which, admittedly, are still germinating in me) that I’ve been able to gave name to recently. Guess what. He was totally receptive! Awesome! I mentioned Continuous Integration, gave him a brief schpeil on the potential benefits, and, perhaps the real selling point, a free tool (recommended by Cory Foy) to do it with. “Great!”
Awesome!
Between helping the new contractor get adjusted, dealing with a SharePoint migration issue, and warding off other departments from dumping their vendor issues on my shoulders, I installed Team City on our source control server (did I mention that I hate VSS? Note to self: migrating it to SVN should be in my Continuous Improvement plan). WOW. I mean, WOW! That was dead freaking simple! I struggled with CruiseControl.NET for what must have been a week, and I had no working build system (recall the part about VSS). FAIL! I spent a whopping half an hour setting up a build, with system tray monitor AND Visual Studio integration. PASS! However, the build failed, exposing a flaw in the project file. Developer FAIL!
Poet Mattie J.T. Stepanek once wrote:
Every journey begins with but a small step and every day is a chance for a new, small step in the right direction.
Baby steps, folks, baby steps.