Myself and Richard will be presenting at the BC Tech Association next Thursday. We will be sharing our story on how we repurposed DevOps, software development, and system montioring tools to transform our business by visualizing the key drivers to our model. Learn why this important for any business and team, and what happens if…
In Summer 2018, our Crafty Penguins team visited the Open Source Summit here in Vancouver BC. Here are some gleanings of “what’s cool” from the post-event journal notes from the sessions we attended and found interesting. Lots of buzzwords in here! The following key takeaways were provided by Richard, Rob, and Curtis. Linux Keynote conversation…
For the last couple of years, we’ve been working to implement Kanban philosophies of work for our teams at Kerkhoff Technologies Inc. and Crafty Penguins. One result of that work is the development of a tool we’ve called CW Kanban to interface with our CRM, ConnectWise Manage, so we can better visualize the work that we do. We are selling this as…
In the rush to create web applications and sites that look snazzy and are functional, something that often gets overlooked is basic user experience in regards to performance. Here are some questions to ask: Could my Google organic search ranking be low because my site is so slow? When somebody clicks a search result (either Organic…
Grafana has a lot of cool built-in drivers for connecting and running SQL against databases. You can see at a glance literally anything you can think of. Do you want a dashboard showing users who are active in a table? Do you want to see how often they’ve logged in? Or how many tickets you…
Trickster is a reverse proxy cache for the Prometheus HTTP APIv1 that dramatically accelerates dashboard rendering times for any series queried from Prometheus. See our previous post about Why we Love Grafana and Prometheus. We are always super impatient so love cool things like Trickster. Dashboards that automatically refresh should now load on average 90% faster. Oh yeah!…
Richard has created a page explaining how we solve the “It Works For Me!” problem for developers, using the illustration of ships and barnacles. Read more….
Recently we built an integration between ConnectWise Manage and Slack. ConnectWise is a professional services automation platform used by thousands of IT Service Providers, handling ticketing, timesheets, projects, invoicing and more. One of the key drivers was to have our engineers focused on work instead of fighting to manage the ticket system and entering time.…
As a team we have many years of experience using a plethora of different solutions for storing code. Everything from paid solutions like Jira and Bitbucket, all the way to hand-written custom solutions to store assembler code. In the end, we’ve settled on Gitlab as a great industry standard solution for all our clients. Among the many reasons,…