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SAN DIEGO, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 23, 2014) - DB Networks, an innovator of behavioral analysis in database security, today announced that it delivers the behavioral analysis and continuous monitoring of databases at the core of the network that can help organizations avoid high-profile breaches, such as those publicized at Target and Neiman Marcus, which result in the loss of customer data and the retailers' reputations.
While details are still being gathered, the findings of the high-profile breach at Target revealed that hackers stole not only 40 million credit cards but also breached database records with personally identifiable information (PII) of at least 70 million customers, including names, mailing addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses. While not uncommon, the revelation of other similar breaches over the holidays has brought the protection of customer data to the forefront. Details common across breaches such as these include the loss of customers' PII over a period of time, sometimes as a result of a database exploit. The largest known breach at a U.S. retailer was in 2007 at TJX Cos Inc., where more than 90 million credit cards were stolen over approximately 18 months.
Having a bad development workflow will cost you a lot. It can make your senior engineers be productive like juniors, or even worse push them to leave the company. A great workflow can make push your good developers to be great and your best to be exceptional.
Getting this workflow in order is one of the most critical steps any business and team can take.
Two best practices that have gained a lot of traction over the last years are Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
Continuous Integration is the practice of testing each change done to your codebase automatically and as early as possible. But this paves the way for the more important process: Continuous Deployment.
Continuous Deployment follows your tests to push your changes to either a staging or production system. This makes sure a version of your code is always accessible.
First, let us have a look at Continuous Integration. I’ll show you how to get started with testing. Later we will talk about Continuous Deployment which is the next logical step and will increase efficiency of your development team tremendously.
Every step in your development workflow that can be automated should be. You need this automation to be able to focus all your time on building your product and providing value to your customers. Testing is one of those steps where automation is key.
Automated testing allows you to implement new features quickly, as you can always prove that your most important features still work as you expect. This gives you the confidence to experiment.
When starting testing your software it’s important to view the app from a user’s perspective. Let’s have a look:
Get started with Selenium, PhantomJS or other frontend testing tools to make sure your application works as expected from the users perspective. Move from testing the user interface to testing lower level code, not the other way around.
Often teams struggle with defining those first important test cases. We’ve come up with a guide on how to start testing, so take a look and see if this works for your team as well.
Tools you can use to start testing your frontend:
Now that we have a strong base of tests let’s go into lower levels and start with Unit-Testing. We want to make sure that the workflows are fine and that our UI works. With every change!
You have the tools, you know how to do it. Now the most important thing is: Get started with testing! It pays off immediately, not just from a software development perspective. You can read about the business advantages of Continuous Integration in this blog post by Joe Green.
It’s too easy for us as developers to say that a specific change won’t break something and later realise it did break the app. Often we are simply too lazy to really run all of our tests. This is where an automated system that runs or tests whenever we do any changes continuously can help us from falling into the trap.
Oftentimes teams work on 2 week or even longer sprints. At the beginning of the sprint a developer pushes some changes that breaks a test. The team doesn’t have continuous integration, so nobody detects the error for a week. At the end of the sprint, before deploying to production, the lead developer runs all tests on a test machine to make sure everything is fine. And only at this point does the team detect the failed test. Now going back and determining which change broke the test is hard and takes a long time, totally unnecessarily. The failing test could have been detected only minutes after it was pushed, but as there was no automated system in place the team wasted precious time late in the sprint, instead of fixing it early on.
The longer the sprint, the more costly this cycle becomes. This workflow doesn’t help the team, the single developer and especially not the company. Relying on automation to tell us early on when something goes wrong needs to be at the core of your development workflow.
Continuous Integration is the first, but very important step in Continuous Deployment.
Have a look at Martin Fowler’s in-depth article about Continuous Integration to learn more about it.
Code rots. It should always run somewhere. There are a lot of changes that can break your app without you realizing it. Think about external dependencies being updated, API’s changed, server packages installed… The list goes on. Often we do not have the ability to control every part of our infrastructure. We rely on other products and companies to maintain parts of our stack.
This is where Continuous Deployment shows all of it’s power. Whenever your main code branch passes the tests it should immediately be deployed to at least a staging environment. Even better if you can go to production immediately. With the master branch running at least on staging you can always have your QA or development team take a look or even use this last version. This shortens the cycle until you find an error or usability problem tremendously.
It moves finding those problems very early into the lifecycle, where it is cheap to fix them, instead of late where you often can’t fix them any more.
Deployment pipelines describe how a change in your application moves through your infrastructure into production. It lays out all necessary automated and manual steps. Every step that can be automated should be, to make the deployments as productive as possible.
Having this predefined workflow pipeline in place will make sure you follow all the necessary procedures when you have to ship a fix quickly. A small mistake could mean a downtime, so relying on automation is crucial for this.
The ability to ship, get feedback from your customers and iterate on your product quickly is a major competitive advantage. Intercom wrote a blog about why shipping is your companies heartbeat. Especially when building the first iterations of your product the importance of shipping quickly and regularly can’t be overstated.
Today, as the costs for creating and publishing software shrunk dramatically, it is vitally important to get your product to your customers quickly. Your competition has the same cheap and productive tools available. Getting the most out of your workflow and push your productivity to the next level is how you can differentiate. Continuous deployment can help you make this happen.
We’ve identified several steps that can help you get started with continuous deployment. These steps have come out of interviews with dozens of companies and constant feedback from the thousands of developers using our product.
Automation is the key to pushing your productivity. Testing a vital step to automate all your quality control. Whenever you want to change your product you need to be able to quickly and automatically assess that everything still works. Getting to this point assures you can iterate and innovate quickly without having to worry about breaking things. It allows to push much farther than you were ever able before.
Tests are first and foremost a tool to keep your users happy. You don’t put effort into testing to make your development team happy or fulfill some vague workflow, but to be sure that you don’t break stuff your customers use. And additionally also to be able to implement the next features they want and pay you for. So start testing with the user in mind. Start testing the Frontend and interactions there first, before moving to lower level tests. Remember we test to make our users happy, not just to create better software.
Tests make software as Clemens laid out in his blog post.
This script tests that when entering good day into google translate it is properly translated from german into english.
With CasperJS you can start testing your front-end quickly and move to more complex scenarios later.
Every step in your deployment has to be automated. There can’t be any manual steps involved, as you will fail to do them once, which will kill your application. As you are aware you automatically start deploying less often. This creates a vicious cycle where the less you deploy the worse your deployment infrastructure becomes. Continuous Deployment works because of automation, so make sure you invest enough time here.
Automating rollbacks is critical when pushing regularly. Otherwise you will always fear to push more. Rollback includes your application code but also your database. Regular backups are an absolute must. Try to restore them regularly as well, otherwise you will never be sure if it really works until you desperately need them.
Automatically push your master branch into a staging application. The staging application is your first line of defense, so you can easily review any changes going into production. This can even include automated tests, so you know your staging server works fine.
Using your own product is incredibly helpful to determine problems in your application. While using your production server is fine, using your own staging system is even better. It makes sure that you immediately detect errors that might take down your application, as you team always uses the latest available codebase.
Finally deploy continuously to your production environment. This workflow will dramatically change the way your whole organization thinks about releasing software. It is not just a little faster deployment, but needs to be planned and included in your daily work and planning. It’s been an important part in the innovation of some of the largest tech companies in the world and you should give it a trie too.
Finding new ways to become more productive is important for every software team. Getting slower, especially in comparison to your competition, could easily harm or even kill your company and product. You want to be able to push quickly and regularly to your customers, so they get the best product possible. Continuous Deployment can get you a long way there.
If any questions come up or if there is anything else we can help let us know either here in the comments or send us a tweet to @codeship. We’ve also recently released a free ebook that walks you through our development workflows and can help you dive deeper into Continuous Deployment. You can grab the book here.
Ship long and prosper!
The post Why You Should Use Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
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Everyone loves a good, clean and simple icon set. Today, we’re honored to present to you a set of 60 vector round icons which was cleverly designed by the creative trio at Roundicons and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. Crafted with great attention to detail, this icon set is extremely easy to use and will most probably be the next ultimate resource for any one of your design projects.
This freebie contains 60 icons that can be used for free without any restrictions and serve various design purposes. You can use the icons in your commercial as well as your personal works. Feel free to modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required. However, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not allowed.
A couple of examples of icons without the rounded containers.
Various file sizes and formats make the round icons very easy to use.
A preview of each icon included in the Roundicons set (click here to see a larger preview).
Here are some insights from the designer Ramy Wafaa Wadieh himself:
“Everyone’s heard of the phrase “A picture says more than a thousand words”, and while I’m not a fan of clichés, that one’s got a point. Images have got to be the most universal language there is. A single illustration is able to get the message across, regardless of the recipient’s background or language skills. Every designer must be conscious of this fascinating phenomenon in order to create attractive and comprehensive designs. For my part, I’m very keen on using icons in my work.
Every icon is first sketched on paper before it is drawn in detail using Adobe Illustrator and carefully reviewed by the team when completed. We aim to provide all possible formats — from vector source files to raster PNGs in different sizes. Additionally, we’re currently working on creating the Photoshop version of each icon, giving each designer the utmost flexibility to enjoy and the ability to use them, regardless of their skill level.
The idea behind the circle surrounding each illustration is that, in our opinion, it is the most complete shape that draws attention to its center and thus the image contained within. Choosing a well-balanced color palette for the circles (which can be changed or removed entirely) the icons look attractive without distracting from the message they send.”
Thank you, dear Ramy, Suzanne and Natalie, for this fantastic icon set! We sincerely appreciate your time and effort!
(ea, il, vf)
© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2014.
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We’ve all been there: the moment when we realise that our project is missing something. With deadlines looming and clients on your back, what you really need is a great resource or two to dig you out of the hole.
Today we’ve got 50 freebies that may just save your skin. We’ve got lots of different resources of all kinds. You’ll find beautiful icon sets, perfect for the web, applications and social sharing. There’s JavaScript and jQuery plugins, including sliders. Some UI kits, frameworks and code experiments. Some useful free fonts and tons more resources.
Let’s jump right in…
A light, uppercase font, suitable for headlines.
A simple flat design set of icons, covering most social networks.
Hardware accelerated transitions using CSS3.
Sentry is a simple, powerful, and easy to use authorization and authentication package.
A huge pack of retina-ready app style icons.
A plugin for lazy loading.
Yaf claims to be the fastest and lowest resource consuming PHP framework available.
A stunning interface for use on mobile apps.
A simple drop menu built in CSS.
A responsive and flat UI for websites.
Hide your header until it’s needed.
A JavaScript library that adds voice commands to your sites and apps.
A CSS3 animated menu that adds perspective to your site.
A funny, semantic, interactive table plugin that uses jQuery, HTML5, and JSON.
An organic typeface with lots of lowercase variation, based on graffiti.
jQuery clock/timer/countdown, plugin in a skeuomorphic count down style.
Image content with description building with CSS3 and Less.
A fun and fancy bubble effect.
Super flexible and light-weight jQuery plugin that generates a aimple, feature-rich and mobile ready slider
An abstract all-caps font.
Natural language processor built with JavaScript.
A fluid and flexible photoset technique.
A beautiful clean font for retro projects.
A simple typeface that includes light, regular and italic weights.
Interactive globes for the Web.
Hallo Sans font, available in light, regular and black weights.
A grid based portfolio theme.
CSS3 loading animations.
A dark, modern looking interface with user profile elements.
Useful vector Instagram interface.
490 icons for Web.
A simple font in multiple weights, ideal for editorial headlines.
PSD concept for a modern music app.
A library of swipe elements with nice animations.
A simple set of infographic UI Elements with a clean style.
A simple menu with animation options.
A Web tool to improve your CSS coding skills.
A handwritten font inspired by Comic Sans.
A powerful WordPress theme best suited to news sites.
Responsive lightbox for scrolling and swiping elements.
jQuery plugin for adapting background colors to the dominant color in an image.
A modern looking HTML template with a countdown clock.
A flexible WordPress theme for magazines.
A jQuery plugin that automatically detects and highlights strings of code.
An edgy, geometric font.
A minimal theme for Ghost, best suited to blogs.
48 labels with a vintage style for any kind of project.
Subtle patterns with realistic light textures.
Another stunning experiment for improving the Web.
A nice library for creating cartoon-like animations.
Have you used any of these resources in a project? Have we missed something you rely on? Let us know in the comments.
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