Tag Archives: legacy

Pipelines…

About 12 years ago, we used a piece of software called Hudson to automate various tasks that were otherwise run by hand. Things like running backup jobs, initiating web server warm-ups, checking on stale DNS records, sending emails reports, executing shell scripts on remote servers, updating firewall rules during peak times of day (think home brew auto-scaling logic), and later on, integrating with Git repositories, and deploying code and config to servers in data-centers.

On a side note, did you know Jenkins used to be called Hudson? It has been around since 2005, and deploying code from Git is only one of the many many things it is otherwise used for by professionals.

Always think outside the box…

Feels like yesterday…

Feels like it was just yesterday when…

We transformed how a full-house inventory exercises were performed across warehouses, for an international book and magazine distribution business.

The solution we introduced included handheld PDAs running Windows CE, with bar-code scanning attachments, hooked up to a custom designed broad WiFi “mesh” network (before modern mesh WiFi became a thing you can buy), backed by a LAMP server hosting the inventory web front-end and database.

This setup was a game changer to the inventory team, as it reduced the amount of time it took to complete their yearly exercise from a multi-week effort to just a few days.

Bear in mind this was before the age of cloud computing, smart phones, 4G/5G networks, lightweight laptops and tablets.

To me, the level of excitement, the dropped jaws on the faces of all team members, senior management, and executive stakeholders, was the payoff to the work we did. It was quite the fun project to be a part of.

This was back in 2003. How time flies by…