Category: software engineering

  • Digesting Microservices at muCon

    On Friday, I had the privilege of presenting at the very first Microservices conference – muCon. In my talk, Engineering Sanity into Microservices, I spoke about the technical issues surrounding state in distributed systems as a whole, how these become a bigger problem as the number of deployed services goes up, and a few suggested […]

  • 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 […]

  • Give your DB the love it deserves

    Pity the poor database. As critical to most apps as a foundation to a building. And as interesting as an accounting seminar at a nudist colony. Not sexy enough for the attentions of the senior dev, or considered to be “well understood”, DB work frequently end up getting handed off to the junior guys on […]

  • Fashion!

    Read this and chuckled. “Our industry, the global programming community, is fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass haute couture designers from New York to Paris. We’re slaves to fashion. Fashion dictates the programming languages people study in school, the languages employers hire for, the languages that get to be in books on shelves. A […]

  • Bored with software?

    What’s interesting right now in software isn’t the new shiny thing. We already have the tools to do most of what we want. What’s interesting is scale and change. You build a system. Then you realize you need to break out and share functionality via modules. Then you want to manage them independently in live […]

  • Get Functional

    That was the message that was coming through the Devoxx conference presentations this year. The idea that it will help your code run in the brave new world of multi everything (multi-core, multi-thread etc.) is one that’s widely touted, but rarely the primary driver for its use. Instead, it’s about less code, that’s more easily […]

  • The Church of the One True Language

    I stumbled upon an interview from JAOO 2007 with Joe Armstrong and Mads Torgensen discussing Erlang, concurrency and program structure (objects versus interrelated processes). It was really interesting to see how similar yet different their points of view were. I’m not going to paraphrase, as it’s worth listening in on it. Two points came out […]

  • A fire-side chat about programming

    Every once in a while I go through a period of introspection where I pose questions like “why am I solving the same stuff all the time?”, “is there a better way to be doing this?” and “what’s around the corner?”. I think it’s pretty healthy, and I prefer to give it a good two […]

  • Be a Better Developer

    I came across 91 Surefire Ways to Become an Even Better Developer while loooking for programming resources similar to Project Euler (the best way to learn a new language). Dozens of links and ideas when you feel that work is not stretching the brain as much as it could. My favourite? Get your boss to […]

  • What can you learn from the guys at Google?

    Anyone whose coding work tends to lean towards the more advanced or low-level should check out Google Code University. Topics covered in this series of presentations include language corner cases, web security, distributed systems and AJAX. Good stuff, worth taking a look at.