My First Release Weekend

At the time of writing this post, I am 41 years old, I've been in the business of writing software for over 20 years, and I have never ever experienced a release weekend. Until now. It's now nearly 1 pm. I've been here since 7 am. There are a dozen or so different applications which … Continue reading My First Release Weekend →

Legislature and Off the Shelf Thinking

I'm always pleasantly surprised when I find an aspect of software delivery which I hadn't previously considered, or seen as fully as I might have. Today I was chatting with a colleague who it turns out has a long history in the business of superannuation (pensions, for those in the UK). I was expressing my … Continue reading Legislature and Off the Shelf Thinking →

Scale or Fail

I've heard a lot of people say something like "but we don't need huge scalability" when pushed for reason why their architecture is straight out of the 90's. "We're not big enough for devops" is another regular excuse. But while it's certainly true that many enterprises don't need to worry so much about high loads … Continue reading Scale or Fail →

Avoiding Delivery Hell

Some enterprises have grown their technical infrastructure to the point where dev ops and continuous deployment are second nature. The vast majority of enterprises are still on their journey, or don't even realise there is a journey for them to take. Businesses aren't generally built around great software development practices - many businesses are set … Continue reading Avoiding Delivery Hell →

What’s Slowing Your Business?

There are lots of problems that prevent businesses from responding to market trends as quickly as they'd like. Many are not IT related, some are. I'd like to discuss a few problems that I see over and over again, and maybe present some useful solutions. As you read this, please remember that there are always … Continue reading What’s Slowing Your Business? →

Don’t Stream JSON Data (Part 2)

I've discussed the merits of JSON streaming in two prior posts: Large JSON Responses and Don’t Stream JSON Data, if you haven't read these yet then take a quick look first, they're not long reads. I'm attracted to the highly scalable proposition of scaling out the consumer, so many requests can be made individually rather than returning a … Continue reading Don’t Stream JSON Data (Part 2) →

Don’t Stream JSON Data

I recently published a post about how to stream large JSON payloads from a webservice using a chunked response, before reading this post it's probably best to read that post here. Streaming is a fantastic method of sending large amounts of data with only a small memory overhead on the server, but for JSON data … Continue reading Don’t Stream JSON Data →

Large JSON Responses

The long slog from a 15 year old legacy monolith system to an agile, microservice based system will almost inevitably include throwing some API's in front of a big old database. Building a cleaner view of the domain allows for some cleaner lines to be drawn between concerns, each with their own service. But inside … Continue reading Large JSON Responses →

Making Decisions with Cynefin

A friend tweeted recently about how it isn’t always possible to decide late on which product to use for data storage as different products often force an application to use different patterns. This got me thinking about making other decisions in software design. In general it’s accepted that deciding as late as possible is usually a … Continue reading Making Decisions with Cynefin →

Getting FitNesse to Work

Sample code here. Recently I've been looking into Specification by Example, which people keep defining to me as BDD done the right way. Specification by Example fully implemented includes the idea of an executable specification. A concept that has led me back to FitNesse having given it the cold shoulder for the last six or seven years. … Continue reading Getting FitNesse to Work →