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We’re back to using Slack for product development communication again, so I’ve been keen to tie in the documentation updates I do via Dexy & Asciidoctor to Slack. What I wanted was to notify the channels setup per product of a new version of the specification along with the URL to the documentation site.
Gitlab has Slack integration ‘out of the box’ as described here. Here’s what that looks like:
GitLab [10:30 PM] James Gallagher pushed to branch master of etckeeper/gitlab (Compare changes)
629601425: saving uncommitted changes in /etc prior to apt run – James Gallagher
ea40dff39: committing changes in /etc after apt run
Package changes:
-adduser 3.113ubuntu2 Show more…
This works great where the audience for the notification is interested in code/configuration changes but doesn’t fit with the use case I described above. So that meant looking instead at a specific Gitlab use case: Web Hooks for tag push events. As I mentioned in the Dexy & Asciidoctor post I tag new versions of specifications – hence tying the notification to ‘tag push events’.
The rest of this post describes the high level approach I took and the [awful] code I used.
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Like many a BA, I get cranky with Microsoft Word as a tool for writing requirements specification documents. ‘Track Changes’ functionality isn’t version control and very quickly becomes unwieldy. I also find that document formatting behaves inconsistently when you get into different sets of section formatting, even when you try to bend numbered lists to your will. I’ve also used IBM’s Rational DOORS in the past for documenting requirements and you get used to that idea of structured editing and establishing relationships between requirements. So, I decided one evening that I’d go to good old plain text and use a markup language for formatting so that I could have absolute control over my documentation.
If you wanted to produce formatted documents without using Word; i.e. using plain-text, what would you use? TeX, Markdown, something else?
— James Gallagher (@tisJames) November 16, 2013
which led to
@tisJames And there's also Dexy.it from @ananelson which was pretty much designed for your use case
— John Handelaar (@handelaar) November 16, 2013
@ananelson @handelaar Oh, I like @dexyit – gives me ideas!
— James Gallagher (@tisJames) November 16, 2013
Off I went with “What is dexy?” and the bit that stood out for me was:
Dexy makes it easier to create technical documents by doing the repetitive parts for you. Dexy provides a consistent interface to tools and scripts so you don’t have to run them manually. Your project’s dexy configuration keeps track of what to run, in which order, and with what parameters. This way, your whole process is captured so anyone can run it using one simple command and the results will be consistent.
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I only managed to capture some of this as it booted, interesting to note the SD card use and the number of errors being reported. I haven’t found much out about the underlying system itself
Two more shots below
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So this is a bit off the wall I’ll admit but I’ll throw it out there anyway. If you want to call it crazy, do :) I’ve deliberately not analysed this in depth as just throwing the idea around is making me smile.
We know banks here in Ireland are basically fucked and as both the effective owners and the customers we’re getting a raw deal. Even without the banking crisis the service we get is poor. The banks haven’t really been about banking as a retail service for a long time. It’s one of the reasons we see so much disruptive movement in the payment space these days (obligatory nod to Stripe :) ) – it’s just one of the functions of a bank that can be done better and the banks simply haven’t bothered. Services like Kickstarter and Fund it show that you can crowdsource money for useful and interesting projects. Credit Unions are basically operated on the same principle :
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