Revolution Systems has been having a great time recently and wanted to highlight a few things that have been happening in our world.
TEDxLawrence 2015
We were happy to have partnered with TEDxLawrence to put on the first ever TEDx event in Lawrence. Frank helped organize and MC the event as a member of the steering committee. We also built the website using our new favorite Django based CMS Wagtail. The videos of the awesome collection of speakers we had will be up in a few weeks on TED.com we'll tweet about that when it happens.
Kansas Linux Fest
Frank also had the pleasure of giving the ending keynote on the first day of the conference. Frank talked on his experience working in devops environments, tips and tricks and advice in his talk Smells like Teen Systems: Advice for raising healthy happy systems and getting to DevOps Nirvana. Frank tried to make it entertaining so prepare yourself for lots of cheesy 90s music references.
It's great to have local Open Source event just a block down the street from our offices. We hope this event will grow much larger in the future and based on the quality of the program put on we have no doubt that it will.
PyCon 2015
We're of course sponsoring PyCon again this year and nearly all of the RevSys team will be there. Be sure to swing by our booth in the expo hall to chat. Frank will be manning the booth most of the time and he will run out of new Reddit posts to keep him occupied if you don't.
Spectrum
We've been hard at work on our hopefully soon to be released desktop developer tool Spectrum. We had hoped to get a beta released to coincide with PyCon, but unfortunately we've been too busy helping our clients to make that happen.
Spectrum is a local desktop app that gives you powerful filtering for your applications logs. In the vein of hosted logging services such as Loggly or Splunk, or self-hosted solutions like Kibana, but specifically targeted at the needs of a developer working locally with features like:
- Inject logs via a local syslog daemon, REST API, or simply tailing local files to support as many local development scenarios as possible
- Send a firehose of logs to Spectrum and instantly show or hide log entries by things like facility, priority, or simple string matching. No longer will you have to adjust the verbosity of your logs and then recreate a scenario or error just to see the logs you need
- Separate project level settings to avoid having to change your setup as you move between projects
We started building Spectrum because relaying a firehose of logs to any of the hosted or self-hosted services we tried simply had too much lag time between the generation of the logs and when they were visible to the developer to make it truly productive. We're building Spectrum using Atom Shell and ReactJS so it will be available for Windows, OSX, and Linux developers and stupid stupid fast.
Follow @devspectrum on Twitter or signup for the Spectrum mailing list for announcements and early beta discounts!
And our biggest news so far in 2015, we added another team member!
In January we were pleased to add our friend Stephen Spencer to the RevSys team. While most of the team are 80% dev and 20% ops in experience, Stephen is exactly the opposite which helps not only round out our skill sets in general but also drastically increases our capacity to take on more operations and devops projects without overloading Frank's already busy schedule.
Stephen has a ton of experience with tools we like such as SaltStack and in fact is the guy who got Frank his first *NIX job and one of his original Unix/Linux mentors. Give a shoutout to Stephen on Twitter to welcome him to our team!
