This is the fifth installment of describing a radically more productive development and delivery environment.

The first part is here: Intro. In the previous parts I described the big picture, Vagrant and EC2, node initialization, and the one minute configuration HeartBeat.

HipChat

The fourth ingredient to the ADD is HipChat. HipChat is meant to help people communicate and see the state of the world. It is an excellent communication program with a plethora of integrations. But for ADD the critical capability is to mix notifications of machines with communication between people. You can also have it be used to drive the ADD system (kind of like a command line) but that isn’t very important since it would just make changes in GitHub which can be made in lots of different ways.

The demo of this is very simple:

The GitHub part is an integration that works out of the box, and the AddBot1 notification is a minor addition to the working script:

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echo "Doing the work for ${GIT_VERSION}"
echo "Doing the work for ${GIT_VERSION}" | bash ${COMMON}/send_hipchat.sh
sleep 121
echo "Done the work for ${GIT_VERSION}"
echo "Done the work for ${GIT_VERSION}" | bash ${COMMON}/send_hipchat.sh -c green

So now we have ‘Action in GitHub’ and visibility to all the activities of the machines that reacted to that action. Finally we can have human augmentation like “@Team New version is up on the development server” to transform something technical to something more meaningful. With proper use of colors, the state of the world is fairly well communicated at a glance (e.g. Reds, Yellows, Greens, and Blues).