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Reactions to the 2017 CoDe and DevOps conference in CPH

This year’s Continuous Delivery & DevOps conference in Copenhagen showed that these practices are here to stay. Now we need the DevOps mindset to take root in the whole organization.

And how to start your journey

Software is eating the world. People are told they need DevOps, but what is it exactly and what does it mean? This post helps you get your DevOps facts straight.

Don’t let Jekyll hide files from you anymore

Jekyll automatically handles wrapping and compiling Sass into Css. That would be fine if it did not delete the source map and made it completely impossible to navigate back - Let’s see how to fix this!

We are hiring a Senior Consultant to our Stockholm office

Continuous Delivery and DevOps are strong trends in our industry and consultants with Praqma provide expert advice in this field.

Falling in love with Everything as Code and Automation

Only a year ago, I was a CoDe Academy student learning about Git, Docker and Jenkins. This year I’m teaching Docker to 24 students at CoDe Academy 2017 in Aarhus.

Praqma settles in southern Sweden

Praqma Malmö is now officially open, and we’re throwing a party! Drop by, have a drink, have a chat, get to know us!

How to make your software obvious

Developers hate wasting time on documentation. We all wish there was less of it. This article shows you how to cut documentation down to the absolute minimum by following a few key development principles.

Continuous Delivery and DevOps are strong trends in our industry and consultants with Praqma provide expert advice in this field.

We are currently looking to hire a Senior Consultant to our Gothenburg office.

At its heart, DevOps is about collaboration - working together to enable business success.

At Praqma we have a strong collaborative culture and invest heavily in developing our people. We are currently looking to hire two DevOps engineers to our Gothenburg office.

Software is too important not to pay attention to quality

Automated testing is a key part of ensuring cycle times are fast and problems are discovered early. At Praqma we have a strong culture of quality and invest heavily in developing our people.

Kickstart your plugin development with a documented example

A practical guide to writing, testing and publishing custom Gradle plugins, complete with a demo repository for a running start!

A modern software bootcamp for graduates

“Are you a student looking to start your software career? Are you ready though?

Understanding the DevOps transition

Everybody wants DevOps! Introducing new stuff in any organization is always challenging though.

How to run HashiCorp Vault in production

Security is important like never before. Keeping your secrets safe should be a top priority. This blog shows you how to get started in production.

An interactive Jenkins showcase

The conference calendar for software developers in Gothenburg is quite frankly, a little sparse. So I was delighted when Praqma decided to hold one of their hands-on “Day of…” events here. This time it was Continuous Integration, and Jenkins in particular, on the agenda.

Stop bothering your IT administrators each time you want to launch a new service

OctoCop Directory for Docker or OCDD for short is a tool to make the life of IT administrators easy in situations when CoDers want to setup a CoDe (Continuous Delivery) server.

GUIs have always killed automation. We’re giving automation a fighting chance.

Automating UI interactions in Jenkins jobs. Crazy? Yes. Cool? Oh yes. Useful? I hope not.

Liveblogging from the conference

We attended GitHub Satellite with a strong Praqma crew. Follow this post to get the latest update from this awesome event.

Back to the roots - roadmapping open software together

CoDe Alliance members - the ambitious Praqma customers - met once again to discuss common challenges related to continuous delivery and to jointly groom roadmaps of existing open software, as well as sketch out new software solutions for truly generic problems.

Getting control of your development environment

Most people have good days at work and not so good days. A good day is when you get to produce code. A bad day is when you spend all your time just figuring out what is going on.

Essential Slack settings to shield your sanity

Slack is great, but it gets really rowdy as your team grows. I’ve compiled a list of useful settings and features to keep you from drowning in Slacktivity.

The pros and cons of implementing Jenkins pipelines

With multibranch pipelines, Jenkins has entered the battle of the next generation CI/CD server. But with contestants such as Concourse and CircleCI, there is no clear winner.

Scratching the container networking itch

What to do when you need more than just ping to reach a container.

The embedded industry shares experiences and challenges

Diverse companies in the embedded industries showed up for Embedded Accelerator Day Oslo 2017. Excellent talks and valuable open space discussions gave everyone food for thought. This blogpost recaps the day.

The tale of sharpening your knife skills

We are all a bunch of tech and tool nerds. We enjoy hacking out a clever solution. Finding exactly the right commands and switches to solve the challenge at hand. Sometimes we go a bit overboard. Many developers don’t think Git is something that we should tinker with. But it is!

We’re not psychic, so why do we bother predicting the future?

Developers still suffer task estimates, despite knowing they’re just fudging numbers. Here’s how we escaped the crystal balls and horoscopes.

Improve delivery of data driven projects from development all the way to production

Applying CI/CD methodologies in an environment using R and OpenCPU

Breaking the rules of consulting

We do things that seem crazy from the perspective traditional IT consultancy. We are not crazy, but just in case you think we are, let me explain why we do things differently.

No developer is an island

Developers love writing code because they get to invent things. But someone else has to use the code, operate it and even pay for it.

Leave no legacy code behind

We all complain about Legacy Code. We are limited by the leftovers from previous developers. But are we not guilty ourselves of leaving Legacy Code behind?

Blogging from the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels

We came to Brussels for Git Merge, heard about FOSDEM and I decided to stay.

Praqma is turning a sharp corner in high speed

Praqma is turning 40 - at the age of nine. Looking back it seems like it has been a relative slow start, but at this point we’re moving at the speed of 2+ employees per month.

A peek into the new world of service discovery

How to proxy a service running in Kubernetes through Traefik as a load balancer and proxy

Introductions in CPH and OSL to the Atlassian tools

This spring we launched the Atlassian Accelerator Day in Copenhagen and Oslo.

Managing versioned source level dependencies

Splitting dependencies is the holy grail in software. Breaking up a monolith into reusable components and services changes everything, including approaches to version control

High hopes this will be my most fun job yet

The life of a consultant has drawn me back, but perhaps surprisingly, this time it’s not a return to my one-person firm.

A challenge we face in Praqma is finding the very right people for the job, and we know our customers are on the same difficult mission. So we aim to make the software developers of tomorrow even better.

Lessons from deploying to kubernetes automatically

Anyone who has worked with Docker containers, or any container technology for that matter, has at some point considered using them in production, simply because of their ease of use. And then, as you take these first steps to a containerized production, quite a few problems arise.

Praqma is at the spot (called the Egg) in Brussels, when GitHub invites Gitters and geeks from all of Europe to come together in 2 full days, where the entire world turns around just Git. We will be blogging from the scene for the next two days.

A peak into the new world of service discovery

Traefik is a reverse proxy and is especially useful when running containers. In this blogpost, we will look at how we can proxy a Jenkins container running on a Docker host through Traefik and how we then can deploy an Artifactory container as well, on the same port, but on another subdomain.

Infrastructure as code with vSphere 6.5

VMware vSphere is widely used for virtualization in the enterprise. Thus you may face the task of managing infrastructure on this platform and of course this should be done as code. This post will give you a jumpstart into scripting the vSphere API.

Good vibes and speaker slides

Praqma’s conference finale for 2016 was CoDe Conf in Stockholm. 150 attendees made the event full to the brim, listened hard, asked great questions, and left us ready for 2017.

Now open to all, no more membership fees

For a couple of years now, we’ve been running Josra; Joint Open Source Roadmap Alliance. The members have produced some pretty awesome open source projects together.

Can you really trust your Docker images?

Just pulling a Docker image from the Docker Hub is like pulling an arbitrary binary blob from somewhere, and without really knowing what’s in it, execute it, and hope for the best!

A bloody yet edifying story about consultancy

This is the bloody but ultimately edifying tale about “The Bonnie Situation”; I use this story as a metaphor for what consultancy is all about - solving problems. You’ll be introduced to Mr. Wolf - ‘Winston’ for those on first name terms - and you will see why we consider him a role model for any consultant.

The onboarding process at Praqma

So, you’re considering joining the Praqma tribe? Cool, We’re looking forward to hear from you! Here’s a short description on how we usually run our interview and onboarding process.

Fall has been kicked off with CoDe Conference 2016. We squeezed a couple of extra chairs in and welcomed 202 attendees at the event - and they seem as happy as we are!

In this blog post, you will find a setup that deploy Docker swarm cluster to AWS.

The Copenhagen CoDe Academy 2016 got off to a flying start. 100 final year software engineering students signed up to learn about our modern Continuous Delivery methods, and they got what they asked for.

Dockerizing different environments is becoming more and more popular. We got the idea to make an environment that would allow us to build Android aosp for any target in a Docker container. As a foundation, we decide to build Android Marshmallow (6.0.1) for Nexus9.

Lars Kruse talks about the Continuous Delivery Maturity Model and DevOps implementation challenges.

For those of you who missed it, here is Mike Long’s talk from NDC on Continuous Delivery for Embedded Software.

As GitHub & Praqma recently entered into partnership in Scandinavia we invited software managers to a breakfast seminar on how businesses are transforming by building methodologies and practices that will drive software development into the future.

This week we had the first CoDe Academy, hosted at NTNU in Trondheim. We had 64 students sign up for the event - and given this is the first week of summer vacation, you have to admire their dedication!

The planning approach at Praqma

Very often developers are engaged in multiple projects. So as an individual you’ll often have more than one milestone to work on in parallel. Learn how we have organized ourselves with issues and milestones in a Kanban style approach with frequent Office Hour sessions.

Pulling changes into a dirty workspace

Investigating the new git autostash feature and how to use it to allow pulling new changes into a dirty workspace.

The writing is on the wall - a mass cognitive revolution in the world of software is underway, disrupting everything in its path. However the key differentiator is not technology, it is communication.

Thinking about an internship at Praqma? Learning new stuff and improving existing techniques and tools is the most important ability that we can provide to our customers.

Partnering up with GitHub is a dream come true

Git, the Open Source distributed VCS, has surely been one of the largest game changers in modern software development. But another one, maybe even bigger than git itself, is GitHub -

Implement your definition of done

The Continuous Delivery pipeline implements and automates the product’s definition of done

A modern software bootcamp for graduates

Are you a student ready to embark on a software career? Do you get the feeling that you might still have a few things to learn before you are prepared for the world of professional software development?

Provision Windows images with Packer tool

In this article, I’ll explain how to provision Windows images with Packer, deploy them to Azure and spin up virtual machines based on them. I hope this article will be helpful for those who want to migrate to Azure and automate image deployment.

Let’s automate Atlassian!

A complete Atlassian tool stack automatically deployed and configured with Docker. Try out STACI and get some hands-on experience, with the Atlassian tools stack in just 15 mins.

A given partnership between toolsuite and consultants

Praqma is a leading expert on all matters of Continuous Delivery, DevOps, and agile development, so engaging in an Expert Partnership with Atlassian was a given

Imagine a 2 hour hackaton at a cosy café

We’re experimenting with finding the right format for informal after-work tech gatherings.

A workflow automated and optimized for simplicity

Imagine a workflow so sophisticated, that you couldn’t break the integration branch even if you tried. And at the same time you wouldn’t have to go anywhere else than your terminal and your favorite IDE to manage issues, promotions and deploys.

A solution which is easy to deploy

Once, during a discussion about optimizing DevOps processes, we realized it would be great to have a Jenkins template setup as a container solution.

Tips, tricks and notes on working with Jenkins Job DSL

A short blog post for those working or wanting to work with the popular Jenkins Job DSL.

A list of pragmatic plugins for pupils and pros alike.

In bygone times, Praqma composed a list of useful Jenkins plugins to spice up your CI life with. However, 2013 is ancient history and we’ve decided that our list is long overdue for a refreshing rewrite.

The reason for dockerizing LinkChecker is to facilitate Praqma’s Gijeli set-up and produce reports for web projects. There are other Docker images of LinkChecker out there, but we find them lacking when it comes to entertaining stable automated builds.

UPDATE: Updated alongside the parser, now picks up warnings with newlines in their messages.

This parser is designed to parse the CSV output from LinkChecker. It assumes that the source of the website that is being parsed is available in the _site directory of the workspace. _site is the Jekyll default, but it can be overridden.

Jenkins plugin developers - let’s look at our documentation process around the plugins. It needs improvements! Wouldn’t it be great if we could automate more of the release process related to documentation?

Atmel Corporation has enhanced the quality of its software testing worldwide and established best practices for automation for all 1500 IT developers in the organization.

At YXLON International A/S the often long and unproductive test, deploy and release phases have been replaced by automation, improved quality and elimination of manual errors in code changes and software tests.

A group of young engineers got a great idea, developed their hardware - and then called Praqma

Being a successful start-up requires more than the right idea and good timing; if your product includes software, then it also requires a software development strategy.

Testimonial

With great appreciation for the collaboration in the ‘JIRA for administrators’ course!

Grundfos and Praqma have been close partners since 2007 and have a constant eye on the optimization potential of software development at Grundfos.