Tilting at Cloud-Based Developer Tools.
Thoughts on how to make services easier to run, debug, and collaborate on locally
Production is for Cattle, but Development is for Pets
Kubernetes makes it easy to manage herds of cattle: lots of servers running in production. Today we’re announcing a simple, open-source tool pets. pets makes it easy to manage herds of cats: lots of servers running on your machine that you want to keep a close eye on for local...
Nick Santos
Monitorama Trip Report
Monitorama was a 3 day conference held in Portland, Oregon that describes itself as an “Open Source Monitoring Conference Hackathon”. I attended the 2018 edition and wanted to talk about a few talks that stood out: Day 1 “Optimizing for Learning” by Logan McDonald This was the first talk of...
Dan Miller
mish: Flexible Shell Notebooks
Shell makes it easy to rerun previous commands, but hard to edit them. Rerunning is <up>-<enter>, but editing requires <up>-<left>-<left>-<backspace>-<wait-how-many-backspaces-was-it>-<etc.>. If you’ve ever been irritated editing in shell, our new tool mish can save you time and hassle. mish is a terminal app that augments easy-rerun with a better editing...
Dan Bentley
GitHub propelled Git to escape velocity
Microsoft + GitHub! Is it more Chocolate + Peanut Butter or Dogs + Cats? Hot Take Tuesday falls on Monday this week: HackerNews is full of Sound and Fury, signifying nothing. GitLab usage is skyrocketing. SourceForge abides. Glitch says it’s good (I agree!) and outlines a new vision for social...
Dan Bentley
mish: cruise control for developers
Our next Windmill experiment is live. mish is a terminal app that automates your development loop. mish watches your files, reruns commands, and displays the output. Refining the commands as your workflow changes is easy and ergonomic. mish is cruise control for developers. It takes minutes to start using it....
Dan Bentley
Windmill Fan Program
Windmill is experimenting with Live Development. We’re building small tools we hypothesize will improve developer workflows. We need people to try them and give feedback. Other companies might call these Alpha Testers. At Windmill, we call them Fans. Fans get to try our experiments. Each experiment should take: 2 minutes...
Dan Bentley
What’s Easier than Clicking “Run Test”? Not Clicking It.
Have you ever been banging your head against the wall, trying to get that one test to pass? It can be frustrating to make a small tweak in your editor and then have to switch to a terminal to run the test, over and over again. VS Code makes this...
Dan Miller
How Windmill Prepped for GothamGo
At the end of April, Windmill (all five of us) trekked down to GothamGo to learn things, meet people, and pitch our product. As Silver Level sponsors, we had our very own little table on the first floor; it was the perfect chance to pitch our fledgling product, make connections,...
Maia McCormick
Bazel is the Worst Build System, Except for All the Others
The Go community sometimes argues about whether Go projects should use go build or bazel build. We talk about this at Windmill Engineering too! We’ve been trying to reconcile two statements: Bazel is magic inside Google Bazel is a pain to integrate in open source projects Why? Before we start...
Nick Santos
“I’m Bored Waiting for my Build” Survey
Windmill Engineering knows that you probably spend much of your day waiting for your code to compile and tests to run and servers to start. While you’re waiting, complain to us about it! What makes you productive, and what sucks up time? Please don’t spend more than 3 minutes on...
Nick Santos
12 GothamGo Talks That Could Have Used More Glitter
Windmill took our entire company to GothamGo last week. There are two of us. It’s a Go programming language conference in NYC. We both wanted to be there. It was an easy decision. I took notes on many of the talks. Here’s a brief summary of each one, and what...
Nick Santos
Strange Loop Trip Report
Strange Loop is great. A technology conference in St. Louis, vaguely focused on programming languages as tools, that’s grown to 2,000 people. A few things stood out: Project Alloy Project Alloy shifts the ratio by sponsoring (and mentoring) underrepresented people to go to conferences. This year, they were able to...
Dan Bentley
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