Automation is essential to maximizing throughput, especially when it comes to being able to confidently release quality software. I believe that anything you find yourself repeating is a great candidate to automate. In most cases, these repetitive tasks can be represented as simple functions! So that got me thinking… maybe I can leverage AWS Lambda for this– things like pull-request review hooks and automatic package versioning + publishing.

One of the big HBC Digital initiatives for 2017 is “buy online, pickup in store” - somewhat awkwardly nicknamed “BOPIS” internally. This is the option for the customer to, instead of shipping an order to an address, pick it up in a store that has the items in inventory.

Sundial

Why an Extra Eye?

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: