Ah it's grand sure

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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In the post Dexy & Asciidoc(tor): A Business Analyst’s documentation tool to look at I went through how I’m using the two tools at the moment. I promised to provide an example within a few days but this has turned into a month now. Anyway, attached this post are the HTML (image not included, you’ll need the ZIP) and PDF outputs along with the full Dexy ‘project’. The content is in a Gitlab git repository.
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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 meant to post this awhile back. At SkillPages we used to have a weekly 5@5 where one of the team played 5 tracks at 5pm on a Friday evening. I chose EDM as the theme of my selection and had a struggle to pick 5 that I think are classics. I ended up leaving out the Prodigy which I’m still unhappy about :) Anyway, here they are; Name <td valign="bottom"> <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana;"><b>Artist</b></span> </td> <td valign="bottom"> <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana;"><b>Album</b></span> </td> Feeling So Real <td valign="bottom"> <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana;">Moby</span> </td> <td valign="bottom"> <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana;">Everything Is Wrong</span> </td> Dr Who?
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Update (03/01/13): the diagram below is hopelessly wrong in regard to the networking for the ‘backend’ containers. I’m leaving the post as is as a reminder of how I worked through the setup. Will add a link here in future when I get the setup right. I’m currently setting up a [> Update (03/01/13): the diagram below is hopelessly wrong in regard to the networking for the ‘backend’ containers. I’m leaving the post as is as a reminder of how I worked through the setup.
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I’m currently upgrading my sister’s 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro so that it can be handed on to our Mum, now that Jeanna has her shiny new MacBook Air (both at healthy discounts from Apple refurb stock). One of the reasons for handing this on is the built in camera which would allow us to use FaceTime. Thankfully FaceTime is available on OS X 10.6.6 and this MBP supports a maximum of 10.
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The project I’m working for currently is about data in the context of a regulatory framework. As part of that I come across interesting articles from time to time. While the industry domain is insurance there’s some good stuff in here about data. Have a look at the presentations over on the BCS.org (British Computer Society) Data Management Specialist Group subsite. Dean Buckner’s is particularly interesting. Haven’t had a chance to listen to the audio yet, just ran through the presentation.
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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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It seems difficult to reach the website for this, so here it is: Mahon Tribunal Report (PDF 56Mb)