Restarting AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com

- 4 minutes read - 695 words

How it all started

Back in 2007 I’ve’ got acquainted with Agile Software Development and got abosultely excited up to the point of starting a PhD on Agile Project management (probably unlikely to be ever completed). Then I’ve figured that one of the best ways to learn was to start discussing the topic and so this site got started. I decided to run in on what was looking great, well customizable and not-your-usual-wordpress - on a self-hosted Drupal

These were the golden days of blogging and.. I felt it was a bit boring to start yet another “just blog” and besides my own knowledge of the topic wasn’t particularly high, so I didn’t have much of useful content to share. Therefore I figured that one somewhat special and possibly useful case could be to get a site where different perspecives on the same Agile thing would be present. I was extremely fortunate that many great people agreed to publish on the site: we had perspectives of a test engineer, project manager, software developer, certainly one of agile coach as well. Some of the authors nowadays run there own popular blogs (and write books, run great courses, run own companies and all other great things). Some of the people I was fortunate to run the blog together were:

Sorry if I missed someone.. after site was hacked and destroyed, lots of archives have died as well. Please, kindly ping me to add your name if it’s missing from the list.

Oh boy, these were good times. On the peak we had nearly 40K unique visitors a month that felt like quite a number for a niche blog. AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com popularity in 2007-2013 We had even a couple of popular YouTube videos before YouTube blogging was a thing!

Security is something not to forget

Then 2010 came, something not very nice happened in my personal life, Nokia I was working for and was quite in love with got destroyed and I had no time for the blogging hobby.

So the hackers came. It seems you can’t really expect your public facing software be stable without actually installing security upgrades and caring of the backups, not when you run a popular PHP software at least. Several times the site was hacked, was filled with spam comments and several times I had to just hard-restore it from an old backup.. until in 2013 it died completely and I had no enenery and will to invest in getting it up again and performing all the painful upgrades. Well, here’s your lesson on managed VS self-hosted. Self-hosted may be more cool and cheaper, but you’ve got to pay with your time.

Back to business

Back in 2017 inspired by my wife’s very own YouTube blog I’ve figured I might still have something to tell. I still want to learn something very customizable (got to be a software engineer trait) yet I absolutely do not want to care about security upgrades ever (non-security nonn-urgent upgrades can be fun).

No software running - no problem

Fortunately nowadays we have static blog generator, try hacking static HTML! Okay, hackers are inventive and things still can get broken, but keeping content in git and just text (actually markdown) feels almost as safe as it gets. Comments.. well, it seems that with static blogs, content are the dynamic part I’ll need to install separately still.

Ladies and gentleman, welcome new and refreshed AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com. This iteration is likely to be more of a personal blog on software engineering, agile, devops, open source projects and whatnot. I will probably republish some of the content digged from the ashes of old site (not that much have survived by some did).

Wish us all luck and let’s have good time!

P.S. BTW, if you happen to know Russian-speaking people with their infants, absolutely direct them to my wife’s blog - she’s got quite awesome content on topics such as how you can safely get into subway with a baby pram if there’s no elevator around.

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