Tools we use

The following are tools we use on a regular basis and which we expect you to either use or at least be very familiar with.

IRC

IRC is our team’s communication tool of choice. Join us in #prk-dev for general developer support, or #vumi or #jmbo for development of those platforms, on irc://irc.freenode.net/.

Various tools report into these channels and provide insight into what is going on.

Git

We use Git. If you work with us, you will use Git for revision control, and GitHub. There is no exception.

Provide us with your GitHub username and we will provide you with a repository to work on. All repositories are to be hosted under the Praekelt Organization on GitHub.

Please read What’s in a Good Commit? for a good introduction to effective use of version control commits.

Avoid these:

  • Don’t commit merge conflicts. See the Pro Git book on merge conflicts

  • Don’t commit snapshots. Only make one change per commit. Read What’s in a Good Commit above.

  • Don’t commit large content files. Manage them in the CMS.

git-flow

We use the git-flow branching model as part of our development. It’s a convenient way to manage your branches. You are not required to use Git Flow but you are required to follow naming conventions it sets with regard to branch names and prefixes.

Have a read through the blog post describing the general idea and follow the installation instructions in the repository to install it for your development platform of choice.

Unless you’ve explicitly been told otherwise, we require our team to review your code before landing it in the develop branch. Please provide pull requests for our review, the command line tool Hub (see below) is a convenient way of turning GitHub issues into pull-requests.

The pull-request requirement still remains when using Jira. You can still use Hub - however your Jira ticket’s status will not automatically change when the feature branch lands, so you will need to update this yourself.

Please read Useful Github Patterns to see ways of working with branches and pull requests that we like.

HubFlow

Hubflow is an adapted version of Gitflow, specifically tailored for use with Github.

It provides the usefulness of git-flow with Github goodness embedded.

For more information on that, see this link: Hubflow

Hub

For projects with issues tracked in Github issues, We use Hub to interface with GitHub’s API. It allows one to turn issues on GitHub into pull-requests. If that is done then once the pull-request is merged into the main branch the issue is automatically closed.

Issues & Tickets

For project work we use Jira. Only our core open-source platforms maintain their issues in the GitHub repository.

You will be given an account to use which will have access to the relevant projects.

For development, if there is no ticket it does not exist. Make sure the work you are doing has a ticket and is being tracked. Stop working and protest immediately if people are treating your mailbox as their ticketing system. We’ve tried that, it does not work.

If a Jira project has a workflow, you need to update your tickets appropriately: New -> Open -> Fixed in dev (when pushed to github) -> Deployed to QA

Our QA team will move the ticket to QA Passed, and our DevOps team will be responsible for the production deployment before the ticket is resolved.

If a ticket is QA Failed then it’s back into your section of the workflow.

A ticket should represent a solid piece of work you intend to do. Make an effort to keep the work you are trying to do in one ticket to no more than 16 hours.

Any estimate you make for actual work done beyond 16 hours is assumed to be

  1. largely thumb-suck.

  2. going to be very hard to review.

Make an effort to keep it to 16 hours or break it up unto multiple tickets each representing 16 hours of work.

Sentry

We have a dedicated Sentry instance for our projects. You are expected to configure your application to make use of this for error reporting.

You will be given access to your Sentry project and access tokens to will be made available for you to configure your application’s client with.

Puppet

We try and automate as much as possible, this includes our hosting environment. You will need to give us your SSH key so we can provision a machine for your project. Generally you will be given access to a machine that is to be used for QA. Since our DevOps team do the production deployments, and you will get access to production error reports via Sentry, you won’t get access to production without a valid need for troubleshooting, and then it will be without sudo access.

These machines are provisioned using Puppet. You will not get access to our puppet repository. If you need specific software installed on your machine that it was not provisioned with then please ask for it to be added. Do not install it yourself without notifying us. This would break our assumption that every machine can be provisioned from scratch with puppet.

If the machine you’ve been working on needs to be rebuilt and you’ve made changes that are not in puppet then it’ll be provisioned without those changes.

Sideloader

Our DevOps team automate deploys using Sideloader, our tool that creates deb packages from github repos. To enable a repo for this deploy automation, create a .deploy.yaml file in your repository, listing dependencies and scripts.

We then use puppet to install the debs whenever a new one is published. Ask our DevOps team for help with Sideloader, and to set up the puppet automation to install the debs.

We can optionally set up a post commit hook to deploy any changes that are pushed to the develop branch, to QA - if you’re feeling lucky…

See Sideloader help for more info (requires login via github).

Databases / data stores

We use the following services to store our data. Not all projects will use all of them but generally a number of these will be involved.

  1. PostgreSQL

  2. Riak

  3. Memcached

  4. Redis

  5. Neo4J

These will be made available to you on a per project basis. Puppet ensures that each of these are backed up.

Django Applications

For Django applications, some applications are mandatory:

  1. Sentry for application reporting.

  2. Django Migrations for handling database schema changes

  3. Nose for running tests.

  4. Haystack for search.

  5. Memcached for caching.

We strongly recommend you use our sample django-skeleton as a starting point for Django projects, as it has some of these already included.

Translations

We use Gettext or translations in shell scripts, applications and web pages. Read more about Gettext along with some examples on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettext

In Django, Gettext is used by default for translations, utilizing ugettext_lazy for models.py and ugettext in other places. We like {% trans %} and {% blocktrans %} tags and enforce these for our open source products.

Graphite

We use Graphite for the majority of our metric publishing for dashboards. If appropriate, you will be given details for the Graphite server and how metrics are to be published to it.

Front-end

Sass CSS pre-processor so that we can take advantage of things that CSS doesn’t have yet, or doesn’t do properly: variables; nesting (used sparingly); CSS partials / includes; media queries used more like element queries; mixins.

JavaScript task runners like Grunt and Gulp, with lots of plugins. These handle code linting, image minification, processing Sass into CSS, concatenation and minification of CSS and JS, and running tests.