Dan Podsedly's blog



Dan PodsedlyDan Podsedly
Chicago Tracker Users Group (CHI.TUG) meetup on Jul 22
edit Posted by Dan Podsedly on Tuesday June 29, 2010 at 03:57PM

We're forming a Tracker User Group in the windy city, and the first meetup is scheduled for Jul 22, at the Hashrocket Chicago office.

I'll be there to talk about the concepts and history behind Tracker, our experience with it, and will give a demo to those that are interested. It's a great place to give feedback and ask lots of questions.

Space is limited, so RSVP soon.

Dan PodsedlyDan Podsedly
Pivotal Tracker scheduled weekly maintenance
edit Posted by Dan Podsedly on Wednesday June 23, 2010 at 02:07PM

For the next month or so, we will be rolling out a series of changes to various parts of the Tracker server architecture, including moving to a Memcached distributed cache for certain requests, cookie based sessions, switching from Mongrel to Passenger, splitting the very large history table, etc.

We're doing this to improve performance, and eliminate potential scaling issues as our traffic grows. To reduce risk, we'll introduce these changes in separate updates, once a week.

These updates will occur on Wednesdays at 7:30pm PDT (including tonight), and last under an hour each. If there are any long running migrations needed, we'll plan them for weekends, or handle them incrementally, to avoid any extended down times.

We understand that these week night outages are inconvenient to many of you, especially in Asia. We apologize in advance, and will try and keep the updates as brief as possible.

Dan PodsedlyDan Podsedly
July 1 NY.TUG Meetup
edit Posted by Dan Podsedly on Saturday June 19, 2010 at 07:45AM

The next scheduled meeting of the New York Tracker Users Group (NY.TUG) will be on July 1, at the Pivotal Labs New York office.

We will be giving an overview of the idea behind Pivotal Tracker and the common features. Based on time and interest, we'll also go into more detail about advanced features, upcoming features, and the philosophy behind Tracker.

Beverages and light snacks will be provided.

Please RSPV soon, as space is limited.

If you're looking for custom reporting and analytics for your projects, Easy Insight just added integration for Pivotal Tracker.

More details about how it works on the Easy Insight site.

Dan PodsedlyDan Podsedly
Pivotal Tracker integration in RubyMine 2.5 EAP
edit Posted by Dan Podsedly on Monday June 07, 2010 at 07:00AM

We're big fans of the RubyMine Rails IDE, and are excited to see that JetBrains has added Pivotal Tracker integration in the latest EAP update.

The integration lets you easily pick a Tracker story from within RubyMine and create a task out of it. RubyMine tasks let you organize your work into different contexts. You can switch between tasks, and create source control changes based on them.

Dan PodsedlyDan Podsedly
New in Pivotal Tracker: Move Stories to Project
edit Posted by Dan Podsedly on Sunday June 06, 2010 at 08:13PM

A common feature request from teams that have multiple projects on the go in Pivotal Tracker is the ability to move stories between projects. We've just added that feature.

Dan PodsedlyDan Podsedly
OAuth For Tracker Twitter Notifications
edit Posted by Dan Podsedly on Sunday June 06, 2010 at 05:10PM

Starting Jun 30, the Twitter API will no longer allow 3rd party applications (such as Tracker) to connect using your Twitter username and password. Instead, applications will be required to use OAuth, an authentication protocol that allows users to approve a 3rd party application to act on their behalf without sharing their username/password.

Pivotal Tracker now uses OAuth for project Twitter notifications. When you enable this feature for your project (see the integrations help page for more on that), you'll be asked to sign in to Twitter (on the Twitter site), and give the Pivotal Tracker application permission to access your Twitter account.

If you have enabled Twitter notifications for your project(s) prior to this release, the stored credentials are in the username/password format. You'll need to remove these old credentials, by clicking the 'Remove Twitter Credentials' button. After you've done that, click the 'Sign In With Twitter' button to re-enable the Twitter notifications using the new, more secure OAuth way.

More information on Twitter and OAuth can be found here.