I seem to enjoy the whole planning what to dress up as, sourcing the stuff, making the outfit and then seeing the results. So here we go so far:

Halloween 08:
Admittedly I didn’t make this one, it was borrowed from a friend who did make it so it sort of counts. Jedi Knight

Red nose day 08
Me dressed as pool table, red face for the top ball just to fit it into the Red nose day theme.

Halloween 09
I was a bit ill for this one but I still think it’s an improvement on the pool table.

Finally – Children in need 09
Out of 100 or so staff, our team was the only ones to dress up. Me as Hellboy:

Now the whole team including our cheerleader:
From left to right: Iron man, Popeye, Hulk, Hellboy and the cheerleader

Hellboy is going to take some beating but I have a few ideas – my next one isn’t something a lot of people either remember, or know due to the age – I like it though and it will be a challenge that’s for sure

A while ago I read an excellent blog post from Timothy Fitz called Continuous Deployment at IMVU: Doing the impossible fifty times a day, that got me started on trying to improve the way we deploy our websites at UKFast but just as important – being able to roll back to a previous version at the drop of a hat.

We had a few requirements such as, hook into current systems, deploy code with near zero downtime, run some post deploy commands, stop deploying on error and keep an archive of old deployments for simple roll back amongst other things.

As you’ve probably gathered by the title, we run Subversion as our version system, it works well as a standalone but that’s never enough for us at UKFast. The system that was developed so far has achieved everything that we need, new or existing sites are deployed usually within 30 seconds but that depends on the size of them, the freshly deployed code is activated online without any loss of service to visitors to the site which is probably one of the best features about this system. It also means that roll backs are done transparently and due to another feature, archives, depending on the (user configurable) number of archived versions we keep, we can roll back to a previous version almost instantaneously as the code is already deployed and ready to go – if we need to go back further past the archived version then a checkout is done on the old version.

Now once a site is deployed, that typically wouldn’t be the end of it. If someone had tried to perform the update manually then it most likely wouldn’t be case of just FTPing up the new website, for one, we usually have some heavy customisation on folder structure, permissions or just because we want something different. So the system needs to cope for this as well, it will allow users to issue post deploy commands from a predetermined list of allowed options. This has so far covered us from all the usual requests our web developers usually ask for and without have to give them a ssh shell!

In the event that any errors are detected at any point the deployment is halted and the user performing the update is notified, no need to roll code back in anyway as the new version hasn’t even gone live yet.

This system has meant we can stop using ssh / ftp accounts for website management, determine fine granular access to developers and mainly, allow us to update our websites at any stage of the day, knowing that it won’t impact site visitors and if it does, then we have a roll back process that takes us 10 seconds to perform and the site will be restored.

Unfortunately the way in a lot of our systems work means I can’t discuss it on an open blog, competitors might be watching. But if anyone wants to pick my brains then by all means, get in touch.

If you were planning to come down anyway then come and say hi, if you weren’t why not pop in and say hi. We’re on stand E142 and should have a pretty decent setup with a few things going on.

Some companies are now making a big deal out of advertising that they don’t send your calls to anywhere other than say, your local branch like the Natwest do. Having today had to deal with, only briefly mind, but that was long enough, a company who have outsourced their support centre to India, it left me thinking that I could never even remotely consider outsourcing the support team I have to India. After the two calls I made with little joy in getting the information I needed, I didn’t know what else to do! The first phone call that I had the luck of having to make ended with me thinking that you wouldn’t want that type of company managing or having anything to do with your company. I called an 0871 number to speak to someone in support to try and get a number redirect working, when I was told that they couldn’t assist because basically they didn’t understand what it was I was referring to, they asked me to redial and press the same option I had for the current call!!!

I stated that surely that would just get me back through to them again and was told, “maybe”?!?! Unbelievable – but I tried anyway
So what happened, well I’m sure you can guess, I called, pressed 1 for support and got a lovely person on the end of the phone – from the same call centre. So went through the same thing as before to see if I got anyone else with at least some clue. Of course that didn’t work and I should have hung up a long time ago, or not even bothered to actually call them back in the first place.

To top all of this off as well, not only could I not speak to someone who understood our account and knew what I wanted or could point me in the right direction but the website for the company had zero contact details that were of any use or actually allowed me to speak to someone in the UK. Not what I would call customers service at all!