productive.dk

Last week Scrum.org launced a redesigned homepage. As part of the redesign I assisted with the development and customization of courses.scrum.org.

Founded by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, and other leading international Agile experts, Scrum.org provides a complete solution for companies seeking high-impact results from Scrum and Agile development.

One of the offerings by Scrum.org is the Professional Scrum Developer program. It is an interesting take on Scrum training—not for Scrum Masters or Product Owners, but for developers.

You can read more about the launch on Scrum.org.

Just found this draft post, that I had almost forgotten about. If you need to monitor POST requests to your Rails application for whatever reason, here is an easy way of doing it:

class HomeController < ApplicationController

  skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token, :only => :post_up

  def index
  end

  # monitored by http://uptime.alal.com/uptime/
  # this will test if Rails is up and responding to GETs and POSTs
  def rails_up
    url = URI.parse(url_for(:action => 'post_up'))
    res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, {})

    # body will be "success" if POST request is successful
    render :text => res.body
  rescue Exception => e
    render :text => "error: #{e.to_s}"
  end

  # verify that POST requests are working
  # we've had problems with Apache segfaulting on POSTs
  def post_up
    render :text => request.post? ? "success" : "only POST allowed"
  end
end

Only downside to this, is that it generates an additional request for every request to /rails_up. If you run a low number of Mongrels or Passenger instances, this might be a problem.