Coder Lounge - May 2014

Coder lounge is the Deeson Dev's monthly developer session where we talk code and try out new things.

This month, Adam was demonstrating the use of puppet to auto build consistent development environments.

Puppet is configuration management for servers - you tell puppet how you want your environment configured and puppet sets it up for you, then keeps it in that state.

By declaring a standardised configuration, puppet can be used to get you up and running quickly when starting new projects or just testing things out.

Meanwhile, Mike fixed some problems in the field_collection issue queue including when the number of values is set to a fixed number there is one fewer field collection in the entity edit form. He also sorted CDN support for respond.js module.

Pete worked his way down the wysiwyg module issue queue which has lots of open issues and really needs a new stable release (the last one was nearly two years ago!).

Experimentation is key!

Coder Lounge is also where we experiment with things we've not used before, so giving ourselves a challenge, we setup an IRC bot in PHP.

IRC is chat room software often used by developers when collaborating remotely.

An IRC bot is software which can login to an IRC chatroom and looks like another person in the room. By writing computer code, you can make the bot respond to what is being said in the chatroom.

First we made a magic cueball program which will respond to questions asked of it with a random 'yes', 'no' or 'maybe'.

We then made the bot provide a random open issue on Drupal.org when asked (using the patch bingo function) which means it can suggest things to work on when you are in need for some inspiration.

We also linked it up to a song lyrics API so that, when asked, it would sing lines from requested songs into the chat room. More useful tools are for the bot to inform the chatroom when an automated build fails or if a monitored website goes down.

Using continuos development tools such as Jenkins which has a REST interface can act as the bridge between these processes. It's a really interesting interface to computer software as it's close to plain English and talking to a computer.

Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science, once set a famous thought experiment he called the Turing Test. In this he states that if a human is talking to a machine and a person and is unable to distinguish which is the machine, then the machine has passed the test.

I think the Deeson Bot (nicknamed Tessa, the name we often use for fake test accounts) may have a little way to go before it passes this test though ...

John: sing barbie girl by Acqua Tessa: ♫Imagination, life is your creation♫ Tessa: Er guys, your website is down :(

Image credit: http://pixabay.com/en/robot-mustache-science-mechanical-161367/