Simply Invoices

Although the focus of this blog is certainly Simply Invoices, occasionally I’ll mention some technical stuff. Like what you see below.

One of the things you should never notice about Simply Invoices is that the source code is hosted at RoundHaus. I only mention this because RoundHaus is now publicly available starting today and wanted to give it a good plug.

If you are a rails developer, I highly recommend you give RoundHaus a try (30 day free trial included w/ all paying plans). Along with never having to remember the syntax to ‘svnadmin’ again, you get:

• continuous integration (more on how this saved me below)
• super easy user control
• “signals” (also more on this below)
• a very purty code browser

I think one of the biggest draws of RoundHaus will be the continous integration + signals. To explain why, let me tell you how it saved me from making a dumb mistake.

I had just finished a small modification to Simply Invoices. All my tests passed. So, naturally I checked in the code and was just about to give it the green light to deploy to the production server. Seconds before I was to deploy I received a tweet in Twitterrific stating “Brian had broken Simply Invoices”. Gah! I clicked the convenient link in the tweet and found the problem in seconds. I forgot to check in a file (duh). I checked in the file and all was well. I waited for the “Brian has fixed…” tweet and deployed.

So, that’s my continuous integration + signals success story. The Twitter signal in RoundHaus, plus Twitterrific makes for a great tag team.

Feel free to follow Simply Invoices on twitter. You can also follow me if you like.