More Details for my time at Impulse Point

I worked at Impulse Point from August 2016 to March 2017.

This was a really cool company. The first day was like this:

1 "Here's a Dell workstation with 16G and 1 TB drive. Configure it any way you want."

A Linux-geek's DREAM!

An hour later, I had Kubuntu Linux installed, with all the development tools running, and the company's SafeConnect repositories cloned, and building locally.

Frontend / Backend Technologies

SafeConnect's newest GUI generation was written in Angular 1.x (which is not the modern TypeScript-based Angular we have today) I already knew Angular from a VisProactive GUI proof-of-concept I had done for Syniverse. The backend was a standard Java/WAR file deployed on plain old Tomcat (the one packaged with RHEL 7).

Source Code Management and Build Processes

The release process was pretty straightforward. They used an internally-managed Bamboo server to run the build. The Bamboo pipeline build the code and packaged it into RPM files. Those RPM were hosted on a public-facing RPM repo server.

Impulse's code was in SVN (Subversion) at the time I joined in 2016. They wanted to move to git, and use hosted Atlassian Bitbucket. I had done some svn->git repositories at Syniverse, so it made sense for one of my first tasks to be converting their 130-or-so repos from Subversion to Git. I achieved it with a bash script that took each repos through all the steps.

Therefore, client sites running the SafeConnect 1U rackmount server could be easily updated with a standard Linux yum upgrade command.`

Thankfully, that is the last time I had to work with Subversion. Not only is Git a better SCM solution than Subversion, but the real win was being able to use the git-based tools produced by pretty much every other tool out there. Nobody talks about Mercurial (hg) anymore.