Coffee and the Art of Customer Happiness

This essay is an extended version of a talk I gave at Paperless Post about coffee and customer happiness. While the talk was originally titled “Coffee and the Art of Software Maintenance”, I figured that customer happiness is overall a much more fitting for the topic.

The Virtues of Monitoring, Redux

Two years ago, I wrote about the virtues of monitoring. A lot has changed, a lot has improved, and I’ve certainly learned a lot since I wrote that initial overview on monitoring as a whole.

On Pager Duty

Over the last year, as we started turning Travis CI into a hosted product, we added a ton of metrics and monitoring. While we started out slow, we soon figured out which metrics are key and which are necessary to monitor the overall behavior of the system.

A Plea for Client Library Instrumentation

The need to measure everything that moves in a distributed system or even simple web apps is becoming the basis for thorough monitoring of an application.

Form Objects with ActiveModel

When I built the billing process for Travis CI’s commercial offering, I decided to try out some new things to avoid callbacks in ActiveRecord models, including validations.