Cloudspace

My development setup right now is a VirtualBox Ubuntu Server x64 guest running on OS X Snow Leopard. I use the VBox shared folder feature to share the document root of the sites I’m working on from OS X to Ubuntu, and edit the files natively using TextMate on OS X. This setup has worked very well for me, as I can emulate the server environment my apps will eventually deploy to (as well as reap the benefits of Ubuntu’s much-superior-to-Apple’s command line). I have no need to buy any third-party ssh-mounting software; it is a completely turnkey solution.

Except for one minor flaw:

In finance, there is a concept called discounting cash flows. The idea can be summed up as the following: since money earns interest over time, $1 today is worth more than $1 a year from now. Adjusting for the time value of money is called discounting a cash flow.

There’s a parallel here. When doing a startup (or nearly any type of software development), code written sooner is worth more than code written later. Discount your code flows. The sooner the code is written:

• the sooner you can start validating ideas internally
• you can release to customers
• you can get feedback from customers and iterate on it

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

I’ve previously mentioned we have an IRC channel. That’s due to practical considerations. When we need to frequently and quickly share information among a group of people who deal with each other often throughout the day (and are generally on the same page to begin with), IRC will work. Notice how many qualifiers I put on that sentence

If you’re using Capistrano’s multi-stage deploy addon, it makes things work really well. Staging servers are excellent for testing and demoing new features and code before releasing it to your users. If you need to change your database.yml files, or another config file, here’s a technique for changing passwords or API keys depending on which stage you are deploying to.

In your main deploy.rb, add an

after "deploy:symlink", :update_config_file
after "deploy:symlink", :update_database_yml

And just throw as many of these in as you need. This will call these tasks no matter which stage you are deploying to (and as an added benefit, if you forget to define a method for a stage, it will error and alert you). Next step is to define an “update_config_file” or “update_database_yml” file for each stage. In your /config/deploy/ path, you’ll have a file for each stage that you deploy to. Go in there and add something like this: