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I love the integration between github and lighthouse. (If you're not familiar with this, have a look.) However, I always found myself forgetting which ticket I was working on when writing commit messages. At first, I wrote this script just to add the ticket number in the git commit message, but it quickly evolved to help throughout the workflow.

When starting on a new ticket, this script helps by

• Assigning a ticket to when starting work
• Creating a local branch with an intelligent name

On completion it will

• Set the state of the ticket to a user-defined value (through the git commit msg)
• Clear the active user (also through the git commit msg)

Workflow

Here’s an example of the workflow…

Setup

Install Bugflow

Just grab this script and put it wherever you like. (I prefer ~/bin)

Install Gem

Grab the lighthouse gem from github:

$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ sudo gem install Caged-lighthouse-api

Project Config

Finally, create a file in the root of your project called .bugflow.yml and add the following data:

Also, it’s a good idea to add this file to your .gitignore.

$ echo ".bugflow.yml" >> .gitignore

Happy hacking!

I was one of the lucky few to get an account in the first round of AppEngine signups, and today I started in on my first app.

I recently found Edward O'Connor's backpackit entry on Personal Unit Tests, and I thought this would make a great little app to get started with. It's like a daily goals tracker, but with a very slightly different focus. More on that tomorrow.

Overall, I was very impressed with the amount of minor annoyances google has removed with this new setup. Having worked with these types of webapps for a number of years now, I know that they're rarely easy to host and deploy, but google has certainly taken the grunt work out of the equation.

I was most impressed on the user account tie-in they've built. It's absolutely trivial to let people use their own google accounts [gmail accounts] instead of creating a new account on each site. Effectively, they've built their own OpenID implementation into the framework.

At the end of the day, I'm reminded a bit of GeoCities and Tripod, who brought static webpages to the unwashed masses. With AppEngine, all that's needed for a small app is a handful of yaml, some html, and a few hundred lines of python.