Home grown versus off the shelf

A couple of weeks ago I spent time in the CloudBees booth at Velocity. I had a conference pass but didn't get to attend any sessions because the CloudBees booth was rather busy.
What hit home was that the more things change the more they stay the same. There are still many places that use home grown scripts and frameworks for their build, test, release processes who approach CloudBees and other vendors once the scripts and associated maintenance have grown out of control.
I've been that guy who wrote automation solutions myself rather than buying a solution. Those of you who are enlightened enough not to have done this might wonder why I would do that. In all honesty, while money did come into it when the economy was bad the real reason is because it was a cool problem to solve by writing code. The headache began once I had to start maintaining the code, bug fixing and so on in addition to doing my regular job. Writing integrations to new systems was particularly a headache as they seemed to be requested at the worst possible times.
I decided that it was best for my long term sanity to leverage as much off the shelf technology as possible. Now that there are a huge amount of tools used in the development and release processes it is essential that any tool I use has a good set of supported integrations to other products.
As you are reading the CloudBees blog you won't be surprised when I say that one thing I really like about CloudBees is that we have a dedicated team who specialize in writing integrations to other products. The reality is they are completely dedicated to that task. As a result we have integrations to over 100 tools, all supported by CloudBees.
If you are taking a look at ElectricCommander or are an existing customer who wants to hook ElectricCommander up to another system you should take a look at our plugins, all of which are installed by default from version 4.1 onwards. For those of you who are uneasy about using an integration without understanding all of the functionality, you are in luck. Our integrations are written in perl and the code is available with every ElectricCommander installation.