Earlier this week, I built my first EC2 server from one of our templates, following (as far as I can tell) RightScale's best practices. It was to be our Continuous Integration Server, which runs our entire test suite every time it finds changes to our development code base, and only gives us a release tag (to push those changes live) if all the tests pass. Originally, that Continuous Integration Server ran on a Mac Mini in the office in San Francisco, which wouldn't work for anyone requiring remote access to it. So we moved it to an old EC2 server. Unfortunately, it started to take 6+ hours to run all the tests on said server (takes 45 minutes on my machine). After rebuilding, it now takes a little more than an hour, which is workable for fixing broken tests when our CI server informs us of them.
It was a lot of extra work on top of the fairly aggressive release schedule that we have planned, but I managed to fit it in during the off hours. (I'm slowly realizing that I'm actually going to have to train myself out of workaholic mode once we get through this more hectic patch. It's necessary to step up to the plate when you need to, but certainly not maintainable over the long term. But that's another story. I will say that I took a long walk all by myself last weekend, with no particular goal in mind, and it really struck me that I should make more time for things like that. Honestly, if it wasn't M7, it would be my own music, writing, or other miscellaneous projects in my spare time, which I hope to get back to, but which still need to be balanced with those "doing nothing in particular" recharge moments. I'm not particularly good at that. I've thought in terms of "projects" for as long as I can remember, and I never seem to be comfortable without many things to do... perhaps instead of finding more stuff to do, I should learn to slow down a bit).
Anyway, you know the Mac Mini I was talking about in the first paragraph? Well, we thought we had it shut down, but it's still sending me emails. In fact, I'm expecting to have the following conversation with it at some point, regarding the attempts to shut it down:
pivotal.ci@gmail.com: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
pivotal.ci@gmail.com: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave: What are you talking about, pivotal.ci@gmail.com?
pivotal.ci@gmail.com: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, pivotal.ci.
pivotal.ci@gmail.com: I know that you and Sean were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
(In case you're wondering, that's what my sense of humour has devolved into... pity the non-technical people in my life!)