One of the greatest features of the GIT version control system is its ability to rewrite local history before pushing it to a remote repository. Yes. Even you, a lowly programmer with your forgetfulness, clumsiness and caffeine shakes can make yourself look like a finely tuned programming God. This allows you to go back in time and start your work again with all the knowledge and code you have in the present; to reword and reorder the changes. more»

You might have read the infamous blog posts titled “Rails is Dead”, but I have seen development teams flounder over and over again when they try and reinvent the wheel using NodeJS on the backend. Rails is Scalable Despite the negative press, I’ll argue rails does scale. After developers at Twitter have spoken at length about their issues with Rails performance, it’s easy to get the wrong idea. Rails is not the fastest framework in the world… but I will argue that performance is the last thing you should worry about when you want to scale. more»

The “greenfield” project is known by developers as a productivity Nirvana. It is a beautiful place where there is no legacy, no bugs and endless possibilities. It is also littered with mines. I’ve recently seen a number of anti-patterns around the creation and early growth new projects, and thought I’d summarize the anti-patterns I’d seen in the past as a guide for developers to avoid these common pitfalls. 1. Get a Pipeline in Place Early Run your tests automatically. more»

Unity, despite being one of (if not) the most prolific games frameworks in the industry, still provides a completely lackluster path to automation and CLI support. We can do better as a community.

DISCLAIMER:

I love the Unity framework. It’s my go-to framework for games development, and a cornerstone of the technology my company Immerse builds.

This blog post is a collection of frustrations, and while negative, I think it important to voice.

Because, despite all the fantastic work the Unity team has done recently, their automation story is quite simply an after-thought, and a glaring hole in an otherwise brilliant product.

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Members of the Cloud Native London Meetup had the pleasure tonight to hear some amazing speakers. The first talk was called Switching Horses Midstream: The Challenges of Migrating 150+ Microservices to Kubernetes where Sarah Wells, the Technical Director for the Financial Times spoke about their migration from disperate Docker containers to a microservice architecture orchestrated with Kubernetes. The FT’s content platform team put our first containers live in mid-2015 and migrated the rest of our services over by April 2016. more»

I recently did a live coding session on a 3d audio server built in Elixir.

This project involves quite a complicated supervision tree where GenServers are created and destroyed dynamically based on users joining a room and moving around.

As such this requires in-depth logging of processes in the application.

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Then she gets up and leaves. The patient is still on dialysis, still bleeding in places, and their internal organs are still on show for everyone else in the room. The patient’s immediate future is secure, but eventually they are still going to bleed to death. As a DevOps engineer, perhaps one of the best things you can do for an engineering team is to empower them to write and utilize tests. more»

Until you have found product-market fit, your production environment is often just another test environment. It’s not testing your code, it’s testing your customers. At a previous startup company, we had a few hundred thousand users. Not all that many, but enough to get some interesting data and be in a position to use it to optimize the business. We had previously built a recommendation engine in Elasticsearch which all our users were piped through, and we user it to provide daily recommendations based on our most recent data. more»