Category: life

  • Lego Space Shuttle Intro

    Build date: 2022-09-10 Father-son quality time. Now I’m going to do an epic Space Shuttle Lego build, inspired by @markawest‘s Millenium Falcon a while back. 2354 pieces. LFG! The assembly manual is 318 pages long! I’m super excited about this. My mum and sister bought it for my birthday. For a kid that ate up […]

  • Lego Space Shuttle Mega-Build

    Earlier this year, I received a NASA Space Shuttle Discovery Lego kit from my mum and sister as a birthday present. It’s BIG – 2354 pieces! I thought this would be an awesome thing to spend a bit of time with my son on – it’s 17 bags of bricks, so a bag each weekend […]

  • New Start; Help Wanted

    As some of you may know, I recently shut down my old company Ameliant, and have joined Confluent – the Good People behind Apache Kafka – as a Solutions Architect. So far, after 5 weeks I like what I have seen. A group of very nice (important), smart people, and a company that has learned […]

  • Adam

    Born early morning on Monday the 21st of November. Mum and baby doing very well. The girls are massively excited to have a little brother!

  • A Milestone

    Last week I completed a consulting engagement with my 100th client since starting work in this field 5.5 years ago. Looking at these last few years in hindsight, it feels like an unfathomable point to be at. I am struck by how much I have learned and how my perspective has developed. It has been […]

  • Running ActiveMQ Replicated LevelDB on VirtualBox

    I have wanted to spend some more time recently playing with Replicated LevelDB in ActiveMQ. Not wanting to hit a cloud environment such as EC2, I set up 3 VirtualBox nodes on my workstation running Fedora. The host system needs to be fairly beefy – you need at least a dedicated CPU core per image […]

  • Gabriella

    Born early morning on Monday the 17th of March. Mum and baby are back home and doing well. Older sister very excited! Daddy very excited to see some sort of balance restored to the household 🙂

  • Apache Camel Developer’s Cookbook

    I am pleased to finally announce the reason that I have fallen off the face of the Earth over the past year – myself and Scott Cranton have just finished writing the Apache Camel Developer’s Cookbook. The book will be published by Packt Publishing later this month. It is available for pre-order on the Packt […]

  • Now consulting independently

    After a long time working as a consultant for others, I felt that the time was right to take off the training wheels and break out on my own. Earlier this month, I re-focused my company Ameliant to independent work, delivering consulting around the Apache suite of integration technologies that I have been blogging about […]

  • Deep testing of integrations with Camel

    One of the things that often comes up in client conversations about developing integration code with Camel is what test support is available, and more to the point appropriate, for testing integrations. There is a spectrum of test types that can be performed, ranging from fully automated unit tests to full-blown multi-system, user-based “click and […]