A new lightrail line is being built in my city with bridges passing over the major boulevards.  Seeing the elaborate scaffolding evoked comparisons to software engineering.  What does scaffolding look like in software? Does software need to be erected like a bridge via scaffolding?  Without a doubt: yes.

Here are some elements of software “scaffolding”:

• Error log instrumentation with a formal error log schema (i.e. errors are uniquely identifiable in a MECE schema)
• Operational instrumentation with reports , dashboards and alerts
• Performance profiling on methods, database calls, rest calls, system calls and any blocking IO.
• Client-side performance instrumentation and sampling of the population.
• Benchmarks established for datasource SLA, server SLA and client time-to-interactivity, among others.
• Unit tests
• Functional Tests
• Client-side tracking of passive (view),  positive ( click, message, follow) and negative (cancel, close-window) behaviors

This scaffolding gives you the resolution needed to understand your application and your audience.  Moreover, it empowers you make well-informed decisions and the agility to move quickly.

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Opsworks is a convenient, powerful and free service provided by AWS to simplify the management of EC2 nodes.  The real power of the system is exposed through customizing various stages of the instance lifecycle by creating custom-tailored chef-solo recipes.

While Amazon provides a powerful deployment layer for PHP applications, it stops short once the PHP code has been checked out of git.  For Laravel or other composer apps, you’ll have to customize your deployment.  The most elegant and straightforward method is through custom deployment hooks.  Here’s how to build a before_migration.rb script to build a Laravel app.

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