"Speaking of Github, I'd love for them to implement pre-commit hooks, because then you could prevent developers from making commits any time the build is broken, which prevents people from ignoring problems in a large code base and just tunneling on building their one little feature. Right now if you want to implement this, you need to setup your own source control repository that can talk to the continuous integration system."

What? No! The whole point of git is a commit should be cheap. If you start restricting commits when the build is broken then you might as well be using Subversion.

That is a good list! Good idea "using SimpleDB for dumping a lot of important metrics data" and reminded me to install webrat, which I just did (people at a Merb Camp were raving about webrat) and from the github doc page, it looks like a good and easy way to sanity check that web apps are not broken.