Self-explanatory....

I realized today that I had made this nice flowchart about two years ago of how I decide when to add qualifiers and increment version numbers, but I never shared it anywhere very useful. This is heavily based on the version numbering scheme that Maven inherently understands. You should also checkout the excellent versions plugin for Maven that include some great utilities for upgrading your plugins and dependencies.

So I started using GitHub for a side project and discovered their very cool feature of service hooks. A service hook allows a repository administrator to setup a callback to another service when a commit is made to the repository. For example it can send an email, or chat a message via Jabber. Now continuous integration servers, like TeamCity , can poll source control systems every few minutes to see if any changes have been committed. But wouldn't it be more efficient to use a service hook to trigger a build? Looking at GitHub's service hooks, there wasn't one already available to callback a TeamCity server, but right on that same page was a link to the open source repository for GitHub Service Hooks . They "eat their own dogfood" so to speak and make it very easy to contribute new service hooks back to them. So I took an evening, did my first Ruby coding in a while which included more time getting Ruby setup and working on my Macbook than actually coding.