Fall in love with continuous testing and integration - Travis-CI
You know, testing is important for software development. With good continuous integration and testing there, you have confidence that your software has a certain quality. It doesn’t mean your software is prefect then, however, when things broken, you can catch them and fix it. Jenkins is a pretty awesome and easy-to-use open source continuous integration tool, but for developing my own hobby open source projects, I just don’t want to rent a server and run Jenkins. So, I am always wondering, wouldn’t it be nice to have something like CI as service? I can just put my code there, and it could do the rest for me.
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Read the full articleZero-downtime Internet process migration in same host
When I am running my website, something troubles me. While there is a bug in the production server, I need to modify code and restart them. Sounds fine, right? Yes, for most of web servers, they are stateless, it is not a big deal to restart them whenever you want, but it is not true for me, they are realtime audio streaming servers. When you restart a realtime streaming server, it means audience connected to the server will be interrupted. Here is a diagram shows the problem:
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Read the full articleGood logging practice in Python
Logging is important in our life. When you transfer money, there will be logs for the transaction. When an airplane is flying, the black box will record flight data. If something goes wrong, people can read the log and get a chance to figure out what happened. Likewise, logging is also essential for software development. When a program crashes, if there is no logging record, you have little chance to understand what happened. Now, let’s see an example in real life. The following screenshot is the log data from one of my running server:
Not only for the servers, but logging is also crucial for almost any kind of software systems. For instance, say you have a GUI app, and it keeps writing logging records in a text file. With that, when your program crashes on the customer’s PC, you can ask them to send the log file to you, then you might be able to figure out why. In the past, I build different apps, all with good logging practices, and this solves countless problems for me. Trust me, you will never know what kind of strange issues there will be in different environments. I once received an error log report like this:
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