To avert chaos it's much better to have an orderly branching model in place e.g. feature branches! My fellow partners made us go all "git flow" last year and the result has been a really tidy and satisfying workflow:
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
Atlassian's SourceTree also helps us with maintaining "the flow":
https://www.atlassian.com/git/workflows
Git extensions and screencast on how to setup on OSX:
Similarly, hotfixes have metadata which goes to their own hotfix.csv file.
A deploy script processes the hotfixes and feature files to create a Release notes.
We've got a very smooth release documentation process which is difficult for Dev's to hate and skip.
However, if you have a team that is comfortable working this way -- and is only occasionally breaking things; it happens -- then it is a wonderfully creative, frictionless, and flexible way to develop.
Works well.
Break the build, all stops, and we huddle and fix it.
Sort of like the andon cord in toyota factories.
I think you're ascribing too much ceremony to this. It's useful to have something written down for any discussion about these changes, and a pull request is as good of a place as any for that. Plus it ensures everything is all set up to merge once you're both satisfied with the changes.
I like the idea of these guides generally. I think it'd be more valuable if they linked to example production code that followed the principles however, since there's no substitute for the real thing.
Come to think of it, I've never seen anybody write up any kind of index of (for example) Github projects that exemplify good design patterns for people to look at. Or some kind of recommended code reference list.
Min's only branch (gh-pages, so we can serve the site with GitHub) is usually "unstable" (in the sense that a CSS framework can be unstable.) If someone wants a stable release, that's what Git's tag system is for.
Keeping master deployable for bug fixes doesn't make sense to me, though. Are you going to deploy new features sitting in master because something else had a bug? Just go look up the last release tag, make your bug fixes there, then merge them into master.
I've been bitten too many times by unstable features holding up releases on master (both my features and other team member's). Feature branches do a wonderful job of solving this and the required merge back into master gives you a nudge to prevent scope creep.
A more appropriate title could be "list of must read articles for modern web development".
This statement is just silly: "A good goal is that the application can be open sourced at any time without compromising any credentials." It's silly because the use of environment variables doesn't prevent anybody from putting them in a shell script that gets committed to git...
But the important part is really that the deployable unit pulls its configuration from the environment where it's deployed. There are a ton of ways to accomplish this...environment variables are one way, etcd/consul is another, you can use something language-specific like JNDI or you can even use a file with configs in a well-known location, but you really need to be deploying the same artifact to QA, E2E testing, production and whatever other environments you might have.
It's (goal) "be able to open source any time without compromising any credentials". One method (practice), use Environment Vars. Evars being a poor choice in your and somewhat my opinion, does not translate into the goal being poor. It's a laudable goal.
First, there'll be extra vars that your PaaS won't fully manage, so you'll have to keep track of them yourself and then later configure the PaaS environment, so your app can access them. Second, for non-PaaS applications/deployments you still need to manage the environment variables.
The variables don't magically appear by themselves :-) They need to be stored somewhere... This "somewhere" is likely to be the git repo (for the app), so you are back to square one on this.
First of all, use git for version control. It is modern, works great and the majority of developers are either comfortable in using it or want to start using it.
Its a pain in the arse to learn, overcomplicated for 90% of the cases it is used in. How many people actually need a distributed version control."
(I use Git. It is powerful and useful, but the justification for using it in the article isn't really great. No mention of Mercurial or other version control systems).
Also, many of Git's most powerful features have nothing to do with being distributed. Easy branching and merging, private versioning, bisect, rewritable changesets, stash, and the ability to cherry-pick individual changes within a file to commit, back out or stash could all theoretically be built into a centralised system.
Perhaps there is something to be said for Mercurial, but unless you were previously on Subversion it's certainly not that it's easy to learn.
One thing that might be missing is good code documentation. Using DocBlock for PHP, for example. Ideally this is maintained in code, but that can get bloaty. At the very least, a git repo of markdown files. Even the built-in github wikis would suffice.
I was not aware this was that common or even considered always the best practice. Is this really the best practice for any website? How exactly is a CDN more optimized than nginx on a dedicated server with 1GB connection?
But like anything, it depends on the use case. If the product is primarily a file server like Dropbox then maybe using a CDN early makes sense. Or your smallish number of users are spread across the world might be another use case.
I think having CDN as a basic requirement for all projects is... ill-considered. Remember, using a CDN is giving away data about your users' browsing practices without their consent.
Also, another website I administer has a lot of user uploaded content that's constantly changing. I've not dealt with a CDN before, so I don't know how CDN helps with that? I think only a fraction of the data is static in this case.
PS Why the hell would someone downmod my honest question?
But most importantly, it lends to dynamic configuration when using etcd or zookeeper.
Because the basics have to be pointed out again ... and again.
I think the upvotes don't primarily mean "omg I never thought to do this" but rather "will someone please staple this to the foreheads of all the clueless devs I've had to clean up after."
Yeah, that's sort of what "best practices" are all about. They are for teaching outsiders what insiders have learned through practice. The intended audience is everyone who doesn't already know this.
If you consider the article of no practical interest for a seasoned insider, that's about the highest praise you can give.
Not to mention those points were mainly subjective. Don't get me wrong, I like and use Git myself but statements like "Use this, most people use it so you must use it too!" are just horrible.
