Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
When we started going through the DevOps toolchain for our new project, we found a ton of bits that normally we (and most likely you) wouldn’t pay too much attention to, because they don’t matter—until they do. Then we all pay attention. That’s why we added them to the toolchain list of options before they became a problem.
It is time to stop, take a look around, make sure you have an inventory of what tools are going into the process of making your secret sauce. The easy one is IDE. For the last little while—say, a decade—we’ve let this largely be a team or an individual decision, but the steps required to do things and the add-ons/libraries used make this less and less about individual choice and more of at least a team, often an organizational decision. We’re doing it at the project level, so functionally equivalent to team. Our Java/Spring app is done in Eclipse because most of you are doing the same for that architecture. But our new Godot project will be in the built-in Godot editor (for Godot Script) and VS Code for C#. Again, because that’s all the rage in several languages, including C#.
Here is the thing though – if you are using VS Code, you should keep a detailed and current list of plug-ins. I’m not a fan of their whole extension installing methodology through the command palette and want to make sure everyone has the tools needed at hand. In an enterprise setting, the ROI is there to just set it up and distribute to developers what they need in a package. But this is only a real possibility if most developers are on the same platform.
What Git Desktop client is in use? While all of them support Git command line in the same format, helping each other use the UI for different operations kind of begs for standardization. Our team doesn’t change much, so I’m not terribly worried about this particular issue. We’re officially using GitHub Desktop, but as long as I’m not doing tech support (because you have a tool that you can’t use well), I don’t care if people stick to it. You might care more about that than we do—in this regard, we’re more like a startup than an enterprise. Since they share a command line, we can afford not to care. If you, as an enterprise, are providing ready-to-code environments, that is a different story.
A couple of years ago we would have had to worry about containers, but these days we’re okay saying Docker locally and Kubernetes for production. While the Godot app doesn’t have a server component (hence the reason we’re keeping the Java/Spring app around), the build environment will be containers because we want to be able to build wherever we need to.
Keep rocking it. I just thought I’d drop a list of what we’re going over—there is more, of course; this bit was focused on the developer tools side of things. I’ll eventually update with the final full stack, but for now, this bit is being put on the back burner while I look at some other areas. ::waves at security peeps::
