Daily notes

I made one video in later 2018 where I talked about SOAP vs REST. I did some preparation before making that video like I made a nice slide where I explained what is SOAP, what is REST and I tried to go through the differences. I made that video mainly to learn myself. Little did I know that the video will become really popular. Right now it is the most watched video on my channel.

You can watch that video here.

I am glad I made that video. Not only I think it was useful but it also gave me an idea and motivation to create more videos which I have been doing since then :)

In December TFL started running the new trains on the Reading Paddington route as part of the Elizabeth line and of course the Cross Rail project which is great. In January the passengers can also pay using the contact less not oyster though.

Yesterday I went to Waterloo and it costed me £25 from Burnham. I paid by just touching in and out at all the stations. I felt like I am traveling in the tube from Burnham to Paddington.

Overall I am happy and I am sure many people will be happy with this.

Just realising that this is my first post of 2020. I think it is a good time to reflect back on 2019 and plan things for 2020. I normally have a plan always with me on things that I want to do in near and long term but it is good to review it from time to time.

2019 highlights
Clearly 2019 was the year when I took YouTube seriously. I was able to maintain consistency and made hundreds of videos.

Also I invested time learning things that I never knew before and it is always a good feeling.

2020
Making videos is my habit now, I have been quite consistent lately, I am making a video everyday without fail but apart from making regular videos I will try to focus on the quality a bit more.

I will continue learning new things this year.

One thing which I was ignoring is my health. I think this year this would surely be my number priority. I have promised myself that I will be in great shape this year.

That is it really. Not making lot of plans for 2020 :)

Thanks to letsencrypt.org I have installed ssl certificate on most of my sites. However after installing the certificate we also need to ensure that the traffic coming to http is redirected to https.

Use the following code in your vhost.conf file or where your apache configuration for the site is stored.

Today I was trying to install simplenews module on my site but I faced some errors related to entity updates after install it. I found these 2 commands to fix that.

First to check what updates are needed use this command.

drush updatedb:status --entity-updates

To actually fix it use the following

drush entity:updates

Now it should fix the problem. Enjoy :)

I checked my Spotify podcasters dashboard where I noticed a summary of my 2019. I started (restarted) podcasting earlier this year and made 18 episodes. I am quite happy with the outcome.

Here is the link to the statistics.

I have made literally hundreds of videos in 2019. I wrote a blog about the tools I use to make these videos and also shared my workflow. The quality of my videos is questionable though and definitely not great but that was my intention from the beginning that I wanted to make as many videos as I can without worrying about the quality. For close to 7-8 months I think I made a video everyday, which is quite good achievement I think :) Honestly it was not difficult, just share whatever you know already but making a video requires some effort.

First you have to figure out how to record yourself, the audio, screen and then you have to edit everything together. I have shared details in my other blog about all the tools but one thing which I figured out is the importance of a thumbnail, especially when you are starting from zero. Honestly I don't care about subscribers and views but it always feels good when many people watch your videos and give you feedback. It is also a skill which I never had and I have learned quite a lot. So I decided quite early to make at least a decent thumbnail in my videos. Of course I wouldn't mind million subscribers. Being an ex-designer (well you never retire from designing do you?) I was tempted to open my GIMP or CorelDraw and make a perfect thumbnail but I am a bit of a perfectionist which is horrible thing because then I would never be able to make something then. So intentionally I decided to do the whole process of video making from recording to uploading within 30 minutes (roughly)

Making thumbnail can consume lot of time and I decided to use few templates that I created in Google Slides. If you look at my templates I have some consistency which I think is important and having Google slides is a great option because you can paste your video's screenshot and then write text on top of it. I have few templates which I reuse for all the videos.

So this was my small recommendation. In case you want to make thumbnails quickly and easily then Google Slides could be a great option and it is free.

One of the best thing I like doing is nothing at all. When you wake up in the morning and don't worry about anything is one of my favourite feeling. People say that travelling is important to take a break for routine and rest but for some reason I find it quite difficult to relax when I am travelling. May be it is just me and I am not used to travelling a lot anymore.

For the past few days I am doing nothing. Literally nothing, apart from making videos for Youtube and working on my site ravisagar.in. Every year I make it a point to upgrade this site or do some work on it. I don't change the theme really but I work on upgrade the Drupal version. This time as well I did the same and made some changes to the site and learnt few more things on Drupal 8.

I always promise myself to be active on this site but I think I should write whenever I feel like and I won't force myself.

I have few more updates to do on this site. Mainly I will try to make it more information. Currently the site is mostly about me and my experiences but I will try to make it informative as well.

I will probably end this note now. Have fun. Bye.

This very lively statue was outside JP Morgan office at Blackfriars. Not sure who is this guy but looks cool.

In Jira you can create multiple custom fields of various types where you want to store crucial information related to you project. To avoid people from skipping those fields you can use a field permission scheme in Jira, its main job is to make a field required or hidden in the project.

Now making a field required makes sense but why would you hide a field using field permission scheme? Why can't we just not add the field?

The answer is very simple - reusing screens. Just like any other configuration in Jira, the screens can also be reused by various projects. Now as a good practice there should have been standards defined in your Jira instance for similar type of projects. When 2 or more projects are using the same screen with same set of custom fields then hiding few specific fields for selected projects can be done using field configuration scheme. You can also use custom field context but let us talk about it another day.

Coming back to the question of making a field required, when you use field configuration scheme, the field is required across the project irrespective of the issue type. That means whether you create a bug or a story in a project the field needs to have a value filled in. It can be annoying for the users.

If this suits you then use field configuration scheme. You may want to use this approach when you want to make sure there is a field across the project that needs to be filled in at the creation of the issue.

For example Summary and Issue Type fields are mandatory at issue creation.

However there will be many use cases where you do not want people to fill in the value in the field at the creation but you need that value to be filled in when the issue is progressed further in the workflow. May be you want to capture RCA when bug is closed or you need to make sure a justification is added when the issue is escalated. In such cases you need to use a workflow validator.

Now in Jira with the help of few apps like "Jira Miscellaneous Workflow Extensions" or "ScriptRunner for Jira" you can make a field required during a workflow transition by adding a workflow validator. If you already have these apps then great otherwise depending upon how much customisations you need to do in Jira, you need to evaluate whether you need to purchase additional apps or not.

I have been creating lot of videos on ScriptRunner for Jira, which is probably one of the most powerful add-on that organisations use to make the best out of their Jira instance. If you are a Jira Administrator than you cannot at any cost avoid it.

The problem is that many people think that learning ScriptRunner for Jira is difficult, in fact it is not at all difficult. Depending upon how much programming experience you already have you can do different things. Even if you have very little programming experience I feel you can still learn it. Using ScriptRunner you won't be developing full fledged applications within Jira (although you can) but most often you will be solving problems big or small to make Jira work for you and that is really important because you cannot install add-on for every other requirement that is not natively available in Jira. Writing small scripts here and there with the help of ScriptRunner will let you achieve those requirement.

Now I have been creating these videos on ScriptRunner and will continue doing so, here is the link to the playlist: https://go.ravi.pro/ScriptRunnerJira

My videos are for absolute beginners and my objective is not to explain to you what Groovy language is and how Jira works but rather I want to focus on how to do small things in Jira using ScriptRunner and with the help of these fundamental concepts and you achieve lot many things.

I hope you enjoy these videos. Have fun and let me know if you like them.

I have to admit that I am little late in upgrading to Jira 8. I didn't really have specific need for upgrading but I think now is the right time.

I will try to upgrade this weekend. Most of the scripts that I have should work at least the basic ones but it is still worth checking them. Also there are few new features that I am looking for to.

I just realised that I have hundreds of video tutorials on Jira and Atlassian tools. You can find most of my videos on this site if you click on the video link or you can go to my YouTube channel.

I don't feel I have so many videos but it feels good and I will continue making more.

Today I noticed that my podcast has started appearing on Google Podcast on its own. I didn't even submit it. Good.

Here is the link

Recently there are lot of new features release on the Confluence Cloud mostly around the UI. Apart from that there is also an inclusion of Analytics in Confluence which I believe will be really useful.

Here is my latest Podcast on this topic.

I started podcasting in 2011 but then stopped as I thought back then that I was not good enough. Recently I started podcasting again, it is still not great but I find it as a nice platform or a medium to share your thoughts.

My podcast link

There are some clear benefits of a podcast over videos.

They are easy to create.
Easy to consume.
Can be very casual just like listening to a friend.
Can be longer.
Require almost no editing.
Listen while doing other things

Watching videos has impact on eyes and it sucks your energy, same is true for podcasts but not at the same level. They are easy to consume and you can be driving or walking and enjoying the weather or a sunny day and still learn something by just listening.

My podcasts are of course on topics like Atlassian tools. Pretty much same as my YouTube channel but it will give me one more medium to share my thoughts.

I really don't think that there is any specific way to write a blog. Blog is supposed to be like a journal where you can either keep track of what you are doing in life, share thoughts and express yourself or about your brand.

I personally prefer blog that are written naturally. I never plan to write a blog, also I never do iterations to edit my blog. I just write it and share it as it is. Simple. I think this approach works really well for individual blogs but for companies they may prefer doing reviews which is fine but I still feel blog should be free flowing with your thoughts and ideas and it is a place where people connect with you.

So don't follow any rules. Written whatever you feel like writing. Enjoy.

The permissions in Jira are quite granular. You can control lot of things that a user can or cannot do. However when a user has a permission to view the project they can also view all the issues under it. You may have a big project with thousands of issues and for some reason if you want to hide a specific issues from a group of people then it can still be donedone using Security Levels.

These security levels can be created and assigned to people and when you edit an issue you can change the security level based on the security scheme used in that project.

Read more.

Enjoy hiding issues.

Very common question people ask, how do we give someone just the read only access to the project. It is actually very simple there is a Browse Project permission. Just modify the project permission scheme and assign this permission to ideally a Project Role like management and let individual project administrators manage people who then want to add in their project for just viewing the data and nothing else.

Simple trick isn't it?

Many years ago when I learned Jira I made lot of mistakes when using the CSV import to migrate issues to Jira. It is a great utility in Jira but it takes time to do proper mapping of fields and process the data in Excel. Even after testing everything on a test project in a test instance I used to still miss something in the CSV. I even wrote macros to process the sheet but still it never always worked perfectly.

So to revert the incorrect import I had to delete or modify those issues and to do that I had to find them using JQL first.

To easily find the recently imported issues I always used a unique label in the CSV file or update any field uniquely to segregate those issue when needed.

This was a little tip. I hope it was helpful. Enjoy.

By the way I recently restarted podcasting, feel free to follow if you want. Link is below ?

https://open.spotify.com/show/7zGIwq6wTBjncOtkHVe8LM?si=az_iqGSQTjyRu10…