Create custom AMI
The biggest annoyance with Syme is waiting for bootstrap. The longest steps in bootstrapping are installing packages, so an AMI that ships with these packages out of the box would be less annoying:
- git
- tmux
- emacs24-nox
- vim-nox
- openjdk-7-jre-headless (this one takes forever to install)
- round it out with curl, tree, zip, unzip, possibly rubygems
Adding a Mumble server would allow for hassle-free voip, though the security group would have to be modified to open the port for it.
I wonder if you could re-use some of the @travis-ci automation especially for detecting and installing language specific libs and tools.
The language detection stuff direct from GitHub works well except for the fact that it only gives us a single language per repo.
Here's the stuff we did at the last seajure meeting (after I tested it, found and fixed a bug, and removed the hard coded stuff we added to get it to work without a database and oauth):
https://github.com/cbilson/syme/tree/issue/23/custom-ami
This adds a field to enter an AMI-ID on the launch screen, defaulting to the same one that was there before if you don't enter one.