Keeping up to date

There a number of official channels for keeping up-to-date with what’s happening with Wincent products, both the public face of things (product releases and updates) and the behind-the-scenes aspects (development activity, technical articles).

Official product and site news

The official product and site news weblog is located at http://wincent.dev/a/news/. You can get to it from almost every page on this website by clicking the "News" button in the navigation bar that spans to the top of most pages. As a shortcut, you can also get there via automatic redirection when you visit the dot-org, a historical wink to the fact that before entering the software business I edited a popular news, rumors and commentary weblog there.

Mailing lists

An alternative means of finding out about new product releases and updates is to subscribe to one of the opt-in mailing lists. The purpose and functioning of the lists are described on this page.

Wincent Colaiuta’s personal weblog

I also maintain a personal weblog at http://wincent.dev/a/about/wincent/weblog/. The vast majority of posts are about my development work and provide a sneak peak at the problems I am working on and the progress that I am making behind the scenes.

Mini-log

In a sidebar on the left-hand side of my personal weblog you can find the "Mini-log". This is where I post quick comments or links that are too short to warrant a full entry on my weblog. A separate feed for the Mini-log is available, and the archives can be found here.

Git log (formerly the Subversion log)

For an extremely low-level look at the development work I’m doing you can check out my "Git log" (formerly called the "Subversion log"). This appears in the sidebar of my personal weblog, below the "Mini-log". The Git log shows the commit log messages that accompany every finalized set of changes to the code bases for my products. The general pattern is to work on a discrete set of changes and then "commit" them to the repository when they reach some sort of important milestone; the "milestone" may be something as simple as the elimination of a particular compiler warning during the build or the addition of a new file, and they can be as significant as implementing a big new feature or importing an entirely new product into the repository. For more information see this brief outline of Subversion and Git.

A feed is available of the Git log, as are archives.

The Git log was set up in late September 2006, so the archives start from that date. The name change from "Git log" to "Subversion log" took place in mid-July 2007, and there are quite a few articles on Git in my weblog archives for that month.

Gitweb

Along with the move from Subversion to Git we get a nice web-based interface for browsing the public source code repositories which correspond to the open source projects used in my development.

Nightly builds

In the right-hand column of my weblog you’ll see a section labelled "Nightlog". This is a collection of links to the latest automated nightly builds that have been uploaded to the server. If you click on those links you’ll see a disclaimer like this one:

Nightly builds are generated once per day by an automated system; they are not official releases and they receive no human testing prior to being uploaded. They are provided with no warranty of any kind; use them at your own risk.

An RSS feed as well as archives are available for the Nightlog.

For background information see this article where I talk about introducing the nightly builds and this follow-up written after the build system went live in March 2007.

Bugs and feature requests database

If you’re interested in keeping up to date with progress towards a specific bug fix or feature implementation you can add yourself as a "CC" to the corresponding issue in the bugs and feature requests database. You can then tailor your preferences to control how and when you’ll be notified when changes are made to the issue.

Forums

Although I try to post most of the information about my progress to my personal weblog, questions occasionally crop up in the forums which may be of interest. Once you have an account for the forums you can "subscribe" to them and be notified once per day (if there are new posts).

Knowledge base

I often make notes in the knowledge base about things I am working on and technical problems I am solving.

The knowledge base is wiki-based and features a "Recent changes" page and a corresponding XML feed that you can use to monitor activity.