Top all-time · #4516
Timothy Fitz
Personal blog · timothyfitz.wordpress.comprogrammingstartups
Timothy Fitz's personal blog at timothyfitz.wordpress.com covers programming and startups. Since 2009, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day.”. The last post was in 2012, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Readers link Timothy Fitz's IMVU-era blog for its continuous deployment writing, including the 'Doing the Impossible 50 Times a Day' post, and for explainers on webhooks and work culture. Comments call its older posts high quality.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day.6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2009-02-10
- What webhooks are and why you should care5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-02-10
- In the Lair of the Cycle-Eaters3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-02-11
- Continuous Deploymont of Downloadable Client Software2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-03-09
- Continuous Deployment: just ship your code to customers as often as possible2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-02-08
- Books about Lean Software Development 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-02-18
What Hacker News says?
You don't have to have any screens. This is your fault for using a wizard based installer. I've stripped as many as I'm comfortable stripping -- it is three. Give me a bit of dramatic license -- unless you've installed a piece of OSS recently, in which case six is perhaps excessively nice. ;) Why doesn't your app prompt the user to buy the full version and open a url to your payment page? It does. Believe me, I've o…
Comment linking /2009/03/09/cd-for-client-software/
on “Why I'm Moving From Desktop Apps to Web Apps”Submitted Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day. as a story · 172 points
HN discussionIMVU. http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...
Comment linking /2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/
on “Continuous Deployment ”Submitted What webhooks are and why you should care as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI agree that we shouldn't extrapolate too much from this one incident. But it's not like Google's super-secrecy policy gives us much choice. If anyone from Google wants to tell us about their deployment infrastructure and explain why this one incident really was a nigh-impossible black-swan one-in-one-billion-hour freak of nature -- or why Google has sensibly traded away a certain amount of uptime in exchange for a…
Comment linking /2009/02/08/continuous-deployment/
on “Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day.”Submitted Why HTTP? as a story · 70 points
HN discussionIf you are specifically interested in this kind of continuous deploy process then "Continuous Delivery[1]" is a decent book on the subject. The IMVU post "Doing The Impossible 50 Times A Day[2]" is another good place to start reading. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321601912 [2] http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...
Comment linking /2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/
on “Deployinator: Etsy's deploy tool open sourced”Submitted In the Lair of the Cycle-Eaters as a story · 31 points
HN discussionOther great blog post on the same subject: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/cycle-eaters/
Comment linking /2009/02/11/cycle-eaters/
on “Work is Fascinating: The Metagame”Submitted Cloud Elasticity as a story · 17 points
HN discussionMistakes are how we learn! :) Below is a good write up by Timothy Fiz [1]. It's old, but it's still a good summary. He references GitHub, which is worth noting. GitHub allows developers to set webhooks for automated tasks that are triggered by repo events. It's a great reference implementation with good documentation [2]. 1 - http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/what-webhooks-ar... 2 - http://help.github.com/…
Comment linking /2009/02/09/what-webhooks-are-and-why-you-should-care/
on “Dropbox: the new file system of the web”Submitted Continuous Deployment: just ship your code to customers as often as possible as a story · 16 points
HN discussionMaybe in the future we can all be IMVU: Back to the deploy process, nine minutes have elapsed and a commit has been greenlit for the website. The programmer runs the imvu_push script. The code is rsync’d out to the hundreds of machines in our cluster. Load average, cpu usage, php errors and dies and more are sampled by the push script, as a basis line. A symlink is switched on a small subset of the machines throwing…
Comment linking /2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/
on “Weekend deployments are for chumps”Submitted Books about Lean Software Development as a story · 8 points
HN discussionCan imagine those sites suffered bit-rot once the technique became widespread, they're very useful, and there's not much to them. A webhook is just a callback that notifies an arbitrary URL when an event occurs. A good explanation is here: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/what-webhooks-ar...
Comment linking /2009/02/09/what-webhooks-are-and-why-you-should-care/
on “IFTTT Needs Webhooks, Stat”Submitted Emergent Properties of Continual Automation as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYou should keep searching the Internet to find out what web hooks are. Here's an article about it: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/what-webhooks-ar...
Comment linking /2009/02/09/what-webhooks-are-and-why-you-should-care/
on “IFTTT Needs Webhooks, Stat”Submitted Continuous Deploymont of Downloadable Client Software as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWeird, I'm not sure why that wiki is down. Try this link for starters: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/what-webhooks-ar... Webhooks are very common for server-to-server communication and have been in use for several years (though they only really took off in the last couple). They are ready for primetime and there are lots of best-practices in the industry around how to implement and use webhooks. They a…
Comment linking /2009/02/09/what-webhooks-are-and-why-you-should-care/
on “IFTTT Needs Webhooks, Stat”Submitted What is Agile, really? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhen you have a good test suite, and automated deployments, eventually you move into the "deploy on every commit" strategy. For more on this kind of thing, http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo... and http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/search/label/continuous...
Comment linking /2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/
on “Tracking Every Release”Submitted In the Lair of the Cycle-Eaters as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is still the best post I ever read about it, and it just so happens to contain the birth of the Lean Startup marketing phenomenon as told by Eric Ries: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deplo...
Comment linking /2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/
on “Ah, Push it. The Push Music Behind 19 Startups.”Submitted 8 books to kickstart your adoption of Lean Software Development as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGood insight into the real, startup-relevant costs of technical debt (TLDR: sucky code makes it disproportionately harder to improve or change your product). It's easy to say "we're a startup, we might throw all this code away next month, so time invested into code quality is likely to be wasted", but as this article describes, that's simplistic and short-sighted. This seems to have been written around the same time…
Comment linking /2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/
on “Pitfalls of Dirty Code”Basecamp can be used in replace of redmine while the development team is small, but redmine is generally better suited for bug/issue tracking as the engineering team grows. As far as processes are concerned at the start, I try to keep it to a minimal as long as everyone is in the room together. If you have a bunch of remote team members, Basecamp/Campfire will probably need to be used more. We use fabric for python/…
Comment linking /2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/
on “Which product dev setup would you choose if you could start from scratch?”I like the IMVU blog: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/ low frequency but high quality. It's been 'mostly dead' for the last year but the old stuff in there is still well worth reading.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What development blogs do you recommend?”
