Pusher is a great service for sending messages from anywhere to your users’ web browsers. It has all the good features of a cloud service: reliable uptime, great customer service and it enables you to outsource a complicated but probably not critical part of infrastructure.

If you are writing JavaScript or CoffeeScript and want to practice TDD, probably the best option for you to implement automatic tests is Jasmine. There are a few nice articles to get you started with the framework (like How do I Jasmine: a tutorial and Testing Your JavaScript with Jasmine) and even a book JavaScript […]

The Semaphore add-on for Heroku is officially out of beta. The add-on makes it easy to set up continuous integration (shhh and soon deployment) for your Heroku-hosted Ruby app.

Sometimes you just want to follow a single project. Or you’d like to catch up and see what’s been happenning. Who’s been busy? Who broke the build and when was it fixed?

Here’s a quick roundup of 3rd party tools that let you get more out of Semaphore.

Our great customers from Cloud Castle have created a nice gem called cucumber_in_groups. If you follow the simple instructions, you’ll be able to parallelize your Cucumber test suite on Semaphore with just the following build commands:

When we launched Semaphore, the market for continuous integration services was ripe for change. Existing solutions were excessively complicated. Emerging hosted solutions offered, in our opinion, a poor user experience at needlessly high prices.

We have added two new endpoints to our API which allow users to get more information about a build.

Welcome to the Semaphore blog! We’ve realized that it’s time to separate from the Rendered Text blog, where we’ll continue to share other news and engineering stories from the company.

As our service continues to grow, we’re seeing more and more companies coming aboard with developers working on many branches simultaneously. If we combine that with the possibility of running tests in parallel, it becomes clear that we need to offer more.

We’re very excited to see command-line tools and libraries being developed on top of Semaphore API. Aleksandar Diklić, who has joined Rendered Text recently, hacked a script which eventually became available as semaphore-status:

Since the launch of parallelism, we’ve seen many users embrace the ease of splitting their builds into threads. We had set a limit of up to two threads per build, to learn how people use them and make sure our platform handles everything without problems.

One of the goals we had with the [recent platform upgrade][platformupgrade] was to have the infrastructure in place so that we can allow all customers to install additional software and tweak configuration settings by themselves.

Today we’ve rolled out an upgrade to the Semaphore build platform based on the latest Ubuntu LTS (12.04). This means that versions of pretty much everything went up. Check out our version information page for details.

Sometimes when you’re using Semaphore you want to skip building some commits or branches. Here’s how you can easily accomplish that.