Author Archives: Ken Judy

About Ken Judy

I am an executive leader, software developer, father and husband trying to do more good than harm. I am an agile practitioner. I say this fully aware I say nothing. Sold as a tool to solve problems, agile is more a set of principles that encourage us to confront problems. Broad adoption of the jargon has not resulted in wide embrace of these principles. I strive to create material and human good by respecting co-workers, telling truth to employers, improving my skills, and caring for the people affected by the software I help build.

This man is why my father became an engineer

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As a boy growing up in West Virginia, my father wanted to study science but a high school teacher convinced him he had no talent for it.

That man was not why my father became an engineer.

My father joined the Navy, served in the Korean War and became a non-commissioned officer.

While enlisted, he took a class in radio/radar technology. The instructor, a well-respected engineer, turned out to be a great teacher – at least for my father. Which is great enough for me.

Vacuum tubes in an old radioMy father became the best student in the class. The instructor’s encouragement convinced him to pursue a career in engineering.

My father earned degrees in electrical and a nuclear engineering and made a long career working with technologies evolved from those he learned in that first class.

Now retired, my father decided to find out who this teacher was who had made such an impact on his life.

***

Nick Holonyak invented the Light Emitting Diode (LED). He is winner of the IEEE Medal of Honor.

Before that he was the first post graduate student of John Bardeen who with fellow Nobel Laureate, Walter Brattain, invented the first transistor.

Somewhere in between these accomplishments, he taught engineering to a class of military personnel.

When my father speaks of Nick Holonyak it is with gratitude and wonder.

***

New York City FIRST LEGO League ChampionshipMy father, the engineer, encouraged me to love science. I studied mathematics and physics and make my living building software.

I encourage my grade school aged daughter to love science. This year, my daughter’s robotics team competed at the New York City FIRST LEGO League Championship.

These are perhaps small things to a man who assisted Nobel Laureates, won prestigious engineering awards, worked at Bell and GE Labs and continues to teach at a research university in a position he’s held for over forty years.

But Nick Holonyak is the reason my father became an engineer. His teaching kindled an enthusiasm that is a source of generational wealth to our family.

Thank you.

More well-wrought crap lovingly crafted for your disposal

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– or – building the wrong thing, really, really well.

The epitaph of many agile teams.

Antique CarYou can optimize your construction practices as much as you want but if there is no discernible need for what you’re building…

The goal is not to build crap well. It is to find a way each day to do less and less crap and more and more not crap.

If this were easy, there’d be a lot more software that people should really get there hands on.

Let’s all look in the mirror on that one…

Agile software development: business value and human values

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I’ve written about agile software development as an ongoing, perhaps excruciatingly gradual, conversation on the definition of value.

We need a place at the conference table. But we also need a forum and language to discuss the human values behind the way we aspire to work.

“… I’ve got to have more experience with junior [children] than a lot of the people who are telling me what I should be doing with them… I think I could help bring a lot to it and nobody ever asks…They just go ahead and proclaim and we have to follow.” -– Anonymous Teacher

This quote is from a study on the failure of education reform movements, called What’s Worth Fighting for in Your School?, by Andy Hargreaves & Michael Fullan.

Reform often fails because reformers don’t engage individual contributors in the goals. Rather, they impose practices upon them. The attempt to improve the classroom actually makes the teacher less effective and sets them against reform.

Sound familiar?

Cape Kiwanda, Pacific City, OregonThe landscape of broken agile adoptions is composed of attempts to make software development “faster, cheaper, better” without embracing the experience and creativity of our core asset, the software developer.

We need to focus a little less on specific practices and a little more on building consensus among our peers over a shared set of values which despite human fallibility and economic necessity inspire us to do good work.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is an attempt by thought leaders to capture these principles. As with all documents, it is an artifact of a moment created to address that moment’s opportunities and constraints.

If we take the “Manifesto” as terms and conditions, something to read and sign before we advance to practice then we glide over the surface of things. It’s not what was written but why people felt the need to write it.

If we take the “Manifesto” as a complete expression, then as happens with codes of ethics, we will use its silence on certain concerns and nuance in the interpretation words themselves to excuse actions by others and even justify the harm we do ourselves.

The “Manifesto”, as with any other artifact in agile, is simply a reminder to have a conversation.

Martin Fowler discussing gender disparities in the industry:

How about a community where women are valued for their ability to program and not by the thickness of their skin? How about a community that edgily pushes new boundaries without reinforcing long running evils?

Bob Martin lobbying to add a fifth principle to the Manifesto itself:

“We value craftsmanship over execution” (or “craftsmanship over crap”)

But the discussion isn’t between thought leaders. It involves every practitioner.

We are here to create long-term value. To build businesses, careers and an industry. This is a labor of years not the current iteration.

If your concerns are entirely short term, then there are less disingenuous ways to extract wealth from people’s effort than to claim you are “agile”.

If you are agile, then you are accountable to the creativity and well-being of the teams with whom you collaborate. You are accountable for the security of end users and the benefit they derive from the software you create.

We are not tools. We are knowledge workers. What we create carries with it the way it was created. What we create is in some profound way us.

Agile software development and “value”

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Release BurndownAs advocates of agile software development we focus on practices.

The hype on those practices is they produce software, “faster, cheaper, better.” And we sell our efforts with the promise of, “delivering value.”

We speak of value as if the definition is shared, self-evident, contained within our backlogs and measured by our burn ups.

At the same time we minimize the hard and long the struggle to achieve mastery, identify and address a material need, and sustain creativity and quality.

So, we win the opportunity to labor with our teams to incrementally deliver potentially shippable units of code to stated business priorities.

When those priorities are pointless, so is the software.

When those priorities are tactical and subjective, the values behind agile practice — sustainable effort, maintainable code, self-directed teams, collaboration and trust — become irrelevant.

The truth is there are definitions of “value” that sell us out whether or not material success accrues to someone as a result of the software development effort.

And so, an agile adoption that is true to its participants is an ongoing, perhaps excruciatingly gradual, but substantive conversation with the larger organization on the definition of value.

A set of practices is only companion to the human values that give our work meaning.

Installing Thoughtworks Mingle on the Amazon cloud

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I had to install an instance of Thoughtwork Studio’s agile project management tool, Mingle. My favorite tracking tool is Excel but such is life.

The instance does not need to be highly-available but I don’t want to risk data loss and I want to minimize the cost of hosting. So I decided to put the instance out on the Amazon cloud.

What follows are instructions targeted to relative newbies to PostgreSQL and Amazon Web Services (AWS) but some basic knowledge of Unix. I’ve tried to give credit wherever I based what I did on content from the web.

The whole process takes several hours with a clean set of notes but took me a couple days of trial and error to get through.

Create and deploy an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

I used Elastic Server to build a clean Ubuntu Linux AMI with the recommended versions of Java JDK (1.5) and PostgreSQL (8.3). Through Elastic Server site I deployed the AMI to a new small instance in our Amazon EC2 Account.

Note: An implementation detail of the Elastic Server image is that the shell account user is different than the PostgreSQL user account so in the following instructions, most bash shell comands run as postgres or root using the su command.

Assign an Amazon Elastic IP to the instance and register a domain name to that IP

Since this is the cloud, I can’t rely on the permanence of the instance. Amazon supplies the Elastic IP service to ensure you have a consistent way to reference your sites regardless of the particular instance the site is hosted on.

Once the AMI was running on a new small instance within our EC2 account, I logged into our AWS console and created and assigned an Elastic IP address to the instance and registered a DNS entry against that IP address.

Move PostgreSQL data to an Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume

The small instance created by Elastic Server uses the instance-store for the boot volume. This is fine for the AMI itself and for the Mingle installation which is easy to install and rev but not for the database storage itself.

We decided the best approach for us was to locate the data store on an EBS volume with copies of custom config files and scripts. We also wanted to create nightly database dumps on that volume. Finally, we’d enable snapshots of the EBS volume giving us a stable store with convenient backup and restorals.

Create an EBS Volume (AWS Management Console)

  1. Create volume 10GB in the same zone as the instance
  2. Create snapshot of volume
  3. Attach the volume to the instance (button in console UI volume tab – takes a while…)

Format and mount the volume from within the instance

Requirements: An attached EBS Volume

Assumptions:

  • Your EBS volume is: /dev/sdf and you are creating one volume. This mount point is listed in the AWS console in the Attachment Information column of the EBS volumes console.
  • You want to mount the volume at /data
  1. SSH into your instance. AWS Console -> Instances -> select the specific instances -> Instance Management -> Connect -> terminal opens login as cftuser
  2. type sudo fdisk /dev/sdf
  3. At “Command” type n
  4. At “Primary or Extended” type p
  5. At Number of volumes type 1
  6. Press “Return” two times to accept the default cylinder values
  7. Press “w” to write the partition table and exit
  8. Type sudo “mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdm” to format an ext3 file system
  9. Type sudo “mkdir /data” this creates a directory called data, which we will use to mount the new volume.
  10. Type sudo mount /dev/sdm /data to mount the drive
  11. (optional) edit /etc/fstab to add the drive mount to automount at boot, this will not automaticly attach the volume to your instance at boot, you need to do that through the RightScale interface or maybe i’ll write another tutorial on that later.
    • sudo vi /etc/fstab
    • add a line: /dev/sdf /data ext3 defaults 0 0
    • type :wq and type return

Instructions based on notes from https://learningspaces.njit.edu/content/how-format-and-mount-ebs-volume

Move PostgreSQL data directory in PostgreSQL config

  1. Stop the PostgreSQL server sudo /etc/init.d/PostgreSQL-8.3 stop
  2. Edit PostgreSQL.conf sudo /etc/PostgreSQL/8.3/main/PostgreSQL.conf
    • Change from: data_directory = ‘/var/lib/PostgreSQL/8.3/main’
    • To: data_directory = ‘/data/PostgreSQL/’
  3. sudo cp -r /var/lib/PostgreSQL/8.3/main /data
  4. sudo mv main PostgreSQL
  5. sudo chown -R postgres:postgres PostgreSQL/
  6. move main directory sudo mv /var/lib/PostgreSQL/8.3/main /var/lib/PostgreSQL/8.3/data_bak
  7. restart server sudo /etc/init.d/PostgreSQL-8.3 start
  8. copy this change to /data/config_copies

Basic PostgreSQL server setup

Change the PostgreSQL postgres user password in order to access the server. As the postgres Linux user execute the psql command:

  1. sudo -u postgres psql template1
  2. \password postgres
  3. ctrl-D (to exit posgreSQL prompt)

Based on notes from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostgreSQL

Create a PostgreSQL database called “mingle”

  • sudo -u postgres createdb mingle

Turn off the software firewall via the Elastic Server Management Console on your instance at port 2999

Mingle needs access to traffic across multiple ports. These are prohibited by rule by the ubuntu firewall. In a situation where you need to lock this server down, you’ll have to figure out what specific ports to open traffic to. I just turned off the Ubuntu firewall. Our instance of mingle ain’t that mission critical.

  1. Open up access to tcp traffic to port 2999 in AWS.
    • Enable port 2999 in the security group to which your instance is assigned in AWS. This is listed in the Security Group column of the instance list in the console. Go to Security Groups, select the group and add a rule to allow tcp traffic on port 2999.
  2. Browse to Elastic server manager and turn off firewall http://:2999/firewall

Install Mingle http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/mingle/3.1/help/installing_mingle.html

  1. Download Mingle
  2. secure copy the install package to your small intance:
    scp mingle_unix_.tar cftuser@:~
  3. sudo mv mingle_unix_.tar /usr/local
  4. cd /usr/local
  5. sudo tar -xvf mingle_unix_.tar
  6. sudo ln -s mingle_3_1/ mingle
  7. sudo ln -s /usr/local/mingle/MingleServer /usr/local/bin/MingleServer
  8. sudo mkdir /home/mingle
  9. sudo mkdir /home/mingle/data
  10. sudo chown cftuser /home/mingle
  11. sudo chown cftuser /home/mingle/data
  12. Edit the mingle config to set the swap directory and to run on port 80


    13. -Dmingle.swapDir=/home/mingle/data/tmp
    -Dmingle.appContext=/
    -Dmingle.memcachedPort=11211
    -Dmingle.port=80
    -Dmingle.logDir=/usr/local/log
    -Dmingle.memcachedHost=127.0.0.1

  13. Start the instance (see below) and wait for the server to startup – takes minutes

Starting Mingle: sudo MingleServer –mingle.dataDir=/home/mingle/data start

Stopping Mingle: sudo MingleServer stop

Run the Mingle setup (refer to thoughtworks studio help)

  1. Browse to the server
  2. Run the install wizard
  3. Create your first user
  4. Enter your license key

Manually managing dumps of the mingle database

  • Dumping a single database (from cftuser folder)
    • sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/pg_dump –create –oids –format=c –verbose –file=”dump/mingle.backup” mingle
  • Renaming the mingle database
    • Stop the mingle server: sudo MingleServer stop
    • sudo -u postgres psql template1
    • ALTER DATABASE mingle RENAME TO mingleback
  • Dropping the mingle database
    • sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/dropdb -i -e mingleback
  • Restoring single database
    • sudo -u postgres createdb mingle
    • sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/pg_restore –create –verbose –dbname=mingle dump/mingle.backup

Setting up a schedule cron job to dump the mingle database nightly at 7pm

  1. Create a backup script and place it in /data named backupmingledb.sh


    2. #!/bin/sh

    #Based on PostgreSQL DUMP RECIPE by Frederik Dannemare
    # Must run as postgres user!

    # Script to automate database backups onto the EBS volume
    # at /data/backupmingledb.sh with owner group postgres (
    # dump dir = /data/database_backups/ again owner/group postgres
    # entered as crontab for postgres user

    export PGPASSWORD=
    export PATH=$PATH:usr/bin
    DATE=`date +%y%m%d-%H%M`

    echo "Beginning to dump mingle database..."
    DUMP_DIR=/data/database_backups/
    DUMP_FILE=mingledump-$DATE.backup
    pg_dump --username=postgres --create --oids --format=c --verbose --file="$DUMP_DIR$DUMP_FILE" mingle 2> /$DUMP_DIR/pg_dump.out
    echo "Mingle database has been dumped to $DUMP_DIR$DUMP_FILE.gz"

    exit 0

  2. Change the owner group to postgres: sudo -u postgres chown postgres:postgres backupmingledb.sh
  3. Make the script executable by postgres user: sudo -u postgres chmod 755 backupmingledb.sh
  4. Create a cron job to invoke the script
    • sudo -u postgres crontab -e
    • To append a new line type: o
    • Type: 0 19 * * * /data/backupmingledb.sh