DEV Community: Frozonic

What do you think about Frozonic?

Frozonic — Tue, 28 May 2019 16:35:11 +0000

What do you think about Frozonic?

Hey all!

We launched our beta a few weeks ago and would love to hear what you think about the app.

Since we launched we've made a bunch of updates to make sure everything is super straightforward.

It would mean a world to us if you could take a few minutes to try it out and let us know what you think. You can visit here and sign up via Github. It is pretty easy.

Thanks to all in advance!

Share your thoughts about code freezing

Frozonic — Wed, 08 May 2019 18:11:35 +0000

In the last few days we've been getting feedback around how code freezing sort of flows in the opposite direction of Continuous Integration, which is not false, it does break it in a sense. But we also believe that for certain situations it is desired to stop merging code into production, here are a few examples:

When young products are being demoed in events.
When Mobile dev teams are submitting an app version for approval in the different application stores.
When infrastructural changes are being made. (i.e. server migrations, database engine migrations, etc.)
When apps need to be reviewed out, or audited for compliance purposes.

Do you agree with these? There could also be a lot more scenarios in which code freezing might be a good idea or strategy, but we would love to hear from you.

Do you think this is a relevant topic or discussion to have?
Do you think sometimes it is ok not to follow a principle completely? (like CI/CD for instance).
What do you think in general about this topic?

Please share your thoughts!

Happy Wednesday!

Prevent undesired code changes

Frozonic — Thu, 02 May 2019 07:04:16 +0000

Startups in general tend to grow and scale pretty fast. When the business has a pretty great market niche, everything is even faster. All of this growth entails showcasing products, pitching the business ideas to potential investors and even making live demos.

Fast growth is great and as startups we should embrace that. However, sometimes it is ok to slow down. It is ok to say: "We won't be merging new code this weekend". It could be because we're pitching the product to investors or because we're gonna be doing maintenance to the servers or because of any other reason. It should be fine to slow down when it's needed.

Teams usually set a period of time in which all code changes are frozen or blocked (This is what we call "code freeze"). There is not a formal or standard way to do this. It's done via email or via Slack.

This seems to work just fine, right? Well, sometimes it is hard to tell, if the code freeze is still on or whether X or Y project falls into that period of time, or even worse, there's not an actual way to prevent someone from merging code. Some teams disable automatic deploys, which is not so ideal, it requires the appropriate people to be available when it is time to enable them back.

Great communication across the teams is very important and enforcing certain rules is even more.

This is what Frozonic is here to help you with. Not only to keep code freezes well communicated across teams and projects but also to enforce nothing is actually merged during code freezes.

You can prevent pull requests from being merged into master if the code freeze check is required for merging. You can easily configure all this periods of time from the Frozonic dashboard.

You won't have to be dealing with permissions and access control since it is all figured out. We map user's access level from Github. So that you don't have to take that extra step of setting everything up once again.

We encourage you to try Frozonic and let us know what you think. Join our beta today. If you liked it tweet about it: @FrozonicApp

Frozonic: Code freeze management for your repositories

Frozonic — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 18:02:21 +0000

Frozonic is a tool development teams use to communicate code freeze windows and avoid undesired product behavior changes.

It is a common practice across companies to let people know via Slack or email that there is a code freeze window happening and that merging code to production is not allowed. Sometimes it is very hard to keep this in mind as teams move forward. Frozonic integrates code freeze checks into your software development cycle to help you communicate code freeze windows accurately, openly and explicitly.

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