Friday Round-Up

Photo credit: PhillipC on Flickr

The Friday Round-Up has moved! And improved, with the standard Twitter Javascript interface replaced by a static page - so no more waiting for it to load. But, it's still on Friday and it's a still a Round-Up of web bits, and it's here: http://bit.ly/IVvJWX

Development Environment Must-Haves: Continuous Integration

Photo credit: MeriaDuck

Use Continuous Integration to automate the quality control process so that you include some quality assurance during development, rather than leave it all to the end. The pre-requisites for this are:

• Source code control using, for example, Subversion
• A standard build process using, for example, ant
• A set of unit tests which exercise the application code as fully as possible

With these in place you can deploy a continuous integration tool such as CruiseControl, Hudson or Jenkins to automate the following tasks:

• Get the latest code base and build it whenever it changes
• Run unit tests against the built code
• Create versions for the release cycle
• Package all components including code and any support files

In such an environment, it becomes possible to:

• Fetch the "current" version of the application easily
• Spot coding problems as soon as they are introduced
• Ensure that all tests are run whenever your application is changed

In this short series I'm outlining the tools you really do need for a professional quality software development environment. Many of them will seem like common sense to many of you. Many of them have been inexplicably missing from development environments I've seen over the past few years. The list isn't meant to be "the final solution" - you may have these things, you may have alternatives, you may have nothing at all - in which case you know where to start.

Monthly LinkedIn Data Analysis

Previously I have described how to extract data from your network using the LinkedIn API, and how I am now storing that data in order to be able to analyse it more fully.

Now that I have another month's worth of data, I've expanded the summary page to include charts for last month as well as this, and for both I've added a new chart which represents any activity on LinkedIn, be it new connections or a profile update.

During March, the shares situation is almost unchanged from February, but more than half made new connections, while the total activity increased very slightly. My network grew by approximately 10% during the month, so there will be some inaccuracy due to the fact that full data will not be available for newer connections.

Click on the link below the summary chart to see the full page:

Click to view full size