Musings on Decentralised Control and Voluntary Adoption in Large Organisations.

Why an Extra Eye?

When HBC’s Mobile team worked at 1 Madison Avenue, my morning coffee ritual involved getting a large black iced coffee from myWayCup as I exited the 6 train at 23rd Street. What they served at myWayCup—a private-label version of Intelligentsia Coffee’s House Blend—was so good that I switched to iced coffee year-round—even through brutal New York winters—a trait that often earned me quizzical looks when ordering my preferred drink during...

We’ll be hosting our first meetup of 2017 in partnership with the NYC Scrum User Group on Thursday, January 19th. This is our first time hosting this group and we’re off to a great start: Ken Rubin will be joining us to lead a talk on Agile.

Now that winter is here and the cold is keeping us inside, I thought it would be good to dream of warm days and look back at a BackOffice team outing from October.

We’re closing out 2016 with two more meetups at our offices in Brookfied Place.

Continuous Integration is a must these days. And for social, open source projects it’s crucial. Our tool of choice for automated testing is Travis CI. Like most tools, Travis does what it does well. Unfortunately it’s not very “smart”. Heaven help you if you have a large or modular project with a multitude of tests - you’ll be waiting an eternity between builds.

Here’s where to find HBC Tech this month:

The Problem

We are thrilled to be hosting Aleksandr Ivanov of Cake Solutions on Tuesday, April 12th. He’ll be presenting an excellent talk on Akka HTTP. Who is Aleksandr? We’re glad you asked:

Join us for an evening of lightning talks by 4 of HBC Digital’s Front End Engineers and an introduction by Steve Jacobs, SVP, Digital Technology and Demand Marketing.

We recently ran across the need to simply scan a file for a particular term during one of our build processes. Surpringly enough, we didn’t find a Gulp plugin that performed only that one simple task. And so gulp-scan was born and now resides on npmjs.org.

After moving our software stack to AWS, some of us here at HBC Tech have started deploying our services to production using AWS’s Codedeploy. Before that, in a not-so-distant past, we used an in-house tool for deployments - IonCannon. One of the things IonCannon provided were deployment notifications. In particular, it would: