Continuous Integration

When you build a new website, going live is relatively easy. You get ahold of a domain name, point it at a webhost, put the website code there, and you're up and running!

After a site is live, it gets a lot more complicated.

DevOps is the union of development, operations, and quality assurance -- but it's really the other way around.

Panacea, or disaster? Drupal 8 Configuration Management was supposed to solve all our woes when it came to dealing with deploying configuration. In many ways it's a vast improvement, but in some ways it has almost made matters worse.

Our branch strategy based on Git Flow did not survive. It was getting a bit old in the tooth, but the final blow was automation.

Its name is Watney. Watney lives in Matrix. Watney is a bot I created about 6 months ago to start helping us with various tasks we need to do in our business.

Watney patiently waits for requests in a bunch of chat rooms we use for internal communications about each website we manage, each project we work on. Watney does a bunch of helpful things already, even though it is still really basic -- it fetches login links for us, helps us assemble release notes for each release we do to a production site, reminds us when it's time to do a release, and kicks off various automation jobs.