being "agile" does not means being "scatterbrained"

I am not (and I do not attempt to be) a Scrum Master or any kind of agile guru, for that I have friends like Jesús Enrique Méndez (http://agileinpills.wordpress.com and his initiative http://www.agileopenspace.org), Gustavo Bonalde (http://gbonalde.blogspot.com/) or Carlos Gabriel (https://twitter.com/CarlosGabriel_). Anyway I am a guy that has spent a lot of time researching, studying, watching in silence how people do the stuff and secretly making some experiments; so I have developed my own opinions.

First, I believe that we need to be really agiles in our process, any kind of waste should be minimized, so why should we keep doing things in the most costly way (time related)?

Second, we need to be productive, that means that expending a year to develop a new functionality is unacceptable, even if you are developing an Operating System the process should not be that long.

Third, your business model or your economical maturity level could give you an advantage over other companies but that does not mean that you are allowed to make mistakes and if you are a small company or startup you will need to use properly any piece of resource that you can get.

Thinking in those three ideas, I usually see how people start being "agile" by ignoring any kind of design or worst, they start being "agile" and they stop thinking in the problem or the possible solutions and they start doing "anything" to solve the problem. I do not want to talk about efficiency or any related aspect to that, but let's take a time to understand the situation, let's draw something, let's get to the reasons of our problem and then we can solve it looking an good/optimal solution. If you want to be "agile" you can start by using the best simple solution instead of the most complicated solution. At this point my two advices are:

remember that thinking and designing are not sins.

keep it simple, do not oversize the problem.

I also see how people try to reduce the development cycle by doing something and sending it to the production environment as soon as they finish, then everybody gets crazy because something is falling; well, when I was a young developer, I learned about a technique (almost magical) to minimize troubles, it is called TESTING, we can not be in a rush and forget about tests, we HAVE to test our codes, obviously something can change and something could fail, but that HAS to be the exception and not the rule. I have saw people that is unable to send a functionality to production without having tons of errors and then breaking everything. Today, we have tools to automate our test, we can use jenkins or any other but we have to use it.

clumsy is not agile.

lazy is not agile.

testing is important for everybody, and we know that things can fail but it should be the exceptions.  

you can be agile testing, that does not mean NO TESTING.

Finally, I have saw people that as soon as they start getting error they start blaming any single API, third party tools or even the astrological configuration of mercury. People, let's face it, usually when something goes wrong we are the responsible, if we work in an orderly way, if we document our code, splitting the problems in smaller problems could make us agiles replacing broken pieces, fixing bugs or improving functionalities.

Well my friends, if you are trying to become an agile developer then you have my bless, just do it, but do it in the right way, do not become a "scatterbrained" trying to speed up developments.

keeping an eye in the platform

Sometimes we feel like our platform is not doing well, maybe we see slowness in the service. Well the answer is lies in questions like:

• are you ready for growing??
• what is the performance of your platform??
• do you know where are the bottlenecks??

Well, in order to discover those answers, you must need an eye on your platform (maybe more than one), today it could be funny and simple, but especially very powerful because the amazing amount of tools available.

If you are using any cloud provider you will enjoy some basic metrics, but the power is in another place, i will give you some options and as usual you will have the task to choose whatever you like and makes you feel comfortable.

• nagios, basically a nice alerting system, mainly use snmp to get metrics from servers and show you the status per hosts/service (ok, warning, critical).
• cacti, it is just graphing, based in snmp you could monitor metrics.
• munin, helpful to collect data because it handle a custom client/server architecture (munin-client and munin-server), this is not a graphing tool, it is for monitoring.
• collectd, i am starting to feel love for this client/server option (like munin).
• graphite, nice graphing server with many frontends available.
• ganglia, data collecting system (client/server) with a really ugly frontend, but pretty fast.

This is a important point, YOU CAN COMBINE SOME OF THEM!!! Yes, you could use collectd+graphite+nagios. Anyway, as usual you should take care of scalability in two points: 1.- do not overload your platform and 2.- your monitoring platform must be ready to scale with you.

Please, monitor and enjoy understanding where are your bottlenecks and your performance opportunities. Remember that it is required collect and process data in order to have elements to analyze and make desicions

to shell or not to shell

For every developer (maybe except for windows developers), one of the most important tools is the TERMINAL, that amazing window is just a door to a fully operative set of element than could give you access to the most powerful ways to control systems.



At the end, the terminal is just a window, what give you more or less option depending of the SHELL that you are using (bash, zsh, csh, etc), but wait, the shell is also a set of commands that interact with the commands available in the OS, because we are developers and we need to help, invent, create, collaborate, etc; we have created tools called frameworks that try to get more a more from the SHELLs.

Thanks to Sergio Rodriguez and because installing ruby and rvm I destroyed my shell configuration, I got hands on one of those frameworks, it is called bash-it, obviously related to bash shell and a plugin/theme based, my first impression was a simple "well, it is good but i miss my previous shell colors", the day after that event I started falling in love with shortcuts, functionality and look and feel.. it was awesome.

But then, Edgar Gonzalez suggested me to test oh-my-zsh, this time a zsh oriented framework that made me said OMG, it is plenty of tools, plugins, themes (in fact they are no accepting themes collaborations because of the big amount of themes available). Playing with that was amazing!

Now, if you ask me for the best one or which one should you use? the answer is: "it depends", are you going to use everything that is available in oh-my-zsh? or, is it enough with the functionality available in bash-it? those are interesting question that only you could answer.

In my case, I am a simple guy, I am not a guy of luxury, and more important.. I love bash, so my "personal" choice is clear.

So, the answer to the title is, OF COURSE, YOU HAVE TO SHELL, and test the different tools. I just hope you enjoy yours as I am enjoying mine.