Week 257

We had an excellent Christmas Mullfest on Wednesday evening. Chris’ mulled wine was a great success, but I’m not sure Nicky and I did Felix’s hot buttered rum recipe justice. What’s more the buttered rum seems to have caused some disrupted sleep - sorry folks! Thanks to everyone for making the effort to come along - it was really good to see you.

Chris & I spent the next day in the office working on FutureLearn while clearing up the debris from the night before. That morning I switched the FutureLearn project over to use Travis CI instead of Jenkins CI. A bit later on I noticed that we were seeing some weirdness with commits from unmerged pull requests appearing in our master-build-success branch which we use for deployment to a staging environment. Not a very desirable state of affairs.

After a lot of investigation and some help from Konstantin Haase in the Travis CI campfire room, it turned out that when a Travis CI build is triggered by a pull request (as opposed to being triggered by a commit), then the TRAVIS_BRANCH variable is set to the target branch and not the source branch. Anyway, we fixed the problem and submitted a pull request to the Travis CI documentation repository.

What with all that excitment, I completely missed Radio Roundabout and a rumoured appearance by Tom Stuart. I hope it all went off ok.

It just remains for me to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We’ll be back with our week notes and links early in 2014.

– James