obfuscurity.
hidden in plain sight

As an open source developer, some portion of my time is spent not just coding and responding to user feedback, but to act as a Project-slash-Product Manager. I have to determine which bugs to prioritize, which features are necessary, and where to allocate my finite resources. Much of this is driven by what interests me at the time and which features will best fit into my overarching vision for the project.

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Sometimes the silliest features are the ones that inspire you most. This was certainly the case with the new Chartroulette view that I recently merged into Descartes. Because I wanted so badly for this to become a reality it forced me to knock out some other dependencies (user model, favorite dashboards, and better user mapping) rather quickly.

To be fair, there's nothing silly about the idea behind Chartroulette. At GitHub we have an internal app by @maddox that allows users to rotate any Mac or iOS-based device's screen through a series of website URLs. Typically we use this to cycle through dashboards or graphs. While I'd love to see this open-sourced, I know that Jon is a very busy guy so I figured that emulating this functionality within Descartes might be the next best thing.

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This is a relatively minor enhancement in terms of LoC but it would take too many words to describe on Twitter so here we are. Recent commits added support for passing interval and columns parameters into Descartes views (graphs, dashboards, etc). Previously you would always get the default layout whenever loading any Descartes page.

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Update / TL;DR: Thanks to Bernd Ahlers (@berndahlers) for clueing me into the fact that you can call rufus-scheduler directly rather than indirectly through resque-scheduler. Because it uses Event-Machine, there's no need to run separate worker processes or queue up the jobs. Consider me sold. The changes have already been committed.

If you still want to read the original post, continue on.

Today I merged in a refactor of the Descartes bits that deal with metrics. Specifically, the live Metrics tab and sparklines view. This will have a profound effect on performance, but can also have a surprising effect on your wallet if you're not paying attention.

So, a little background on how Descartes used to operate and why this change was necessary. Not too long ago I added a new Metrics page that displays sparklines for every metric in your Graphite server and lets you click on them to create a composite graph. Although the page is still rather immature, it's useful for basic visualization and graph creation. Personally I think its major selling point right now is in the sparklines I mentioned. This is one thing that you don't really get with native Graphite -- being able to quickly see activity patterns on any metrics without going through the hassle of actually creating a graph. This is made that much more awesome by the presence of live filtering. Click on the Add to Graph button and you're presented with an additional input field that, as you type a string, will filter down the list of metric sparklines you're viewing in realtime.

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I've been a little busy lately and haven't found the time to post any new articles, Graphite-related or otherwise. For those who missed the announcement, I started working at GitHub in July. Initially I continued my work on Descartes; more recently my time has been split up among a few different projects, both inside and outside of work. Although I generally detest announcing plans before shipping them, I thought others might like to read about what I'm working on these days.

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ove fonts? Check out the work by Jessica Hische over at the Daily Drop Cap. I stumbled across her work thanks to an interview linked by @shiflett. Believe it or not, I was an art geek before I went full-bore UNIX geek. I still have an appreciation for the analog arts even though I'm a left-brainer now.

Jessica's work is very impressive. It almost makes me want to try my hand at letterpress. And then I saw Pictorial Webster's and became afraid. Very afraid. Just kidding, it's unbelievably cool no matter which half of your brain dominates. Check it out now!