An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

Not here obviously, but on the guardian website.  My first blog post has gone live.  That should make Mr Brunning fairly jealous

One of our agile techniques at guardian.co.uk is to have a central build machine.  The only way that the code that I write can get out into our production servers is to get copied to a central machine (using something called source control) and that central machine runs all the processes that turn my code into the program that actually serves the website.

This provides us with an environment that does the build in a repeatable, consistent way.  But sometimes I might “check in” code that doesn’t actually work.  Because we write tests as we go, this shouldn’t happen, but it does more often than you would think.  We need a way to find out that the building machine has broken code.  The developers have access to that information via a program called ccTray.  But we felt it was important to be able to get that information out to everybody working on the project in an easy way.

The thing that gets that information out is called a build radiator, because it radiates the information about the build to the room, and I had the privilage of working on developing a custom build radiator.  I’ve written up my experiences of developing that software on the build doctor as a guest post, and you may want to read it.