A software engineer's journey
(Originally published in December 2020 - moved here from a another blog site that I had) In a previous blog post I mused on playful creativity and innovation. I reflected on the software industry from what I have seen in my career so far. I talked about how companies can become overburdened with processes and bureaucracy. It …
Continue reading "Model View Events with Action Replay — No Frameworks Allowed"
Recently, my parents very generously gave myself and my family the old piano that was a massive part of my life for so long. This is the piano that I first discovered a love for music on when I was a child. It’s the piano that I wrote broken-hearted love songs on as a hormonal teenager. …
Continue reading "In a world full of Jiras, have we forgotten how to play?"
“Stop copying me!!” is a phrase that I hear a lot from the back of the car when my 3 kids are back there. The age old tried and tested way to really annoy somebody is to repeatedly repeat back everything they say. Children learn how effective this is from an early age. It’s especially …
Algebraic data types(ADTs) sound pretty esoteric but they are very practical and they are a key feature of typed functional programming languages like Scala. They allow us to model our domains in a type safe way and to delegate some of the testing burden to the compiler. Two of the essential words to understand in …
So, Haskell sounds quite daunting right? All this talk of monads and functors when all you want to do is just try out some simple problems and see what it’s like to play around with this language! Monads and functors are actually not that scary once you get into functional programming but, for today, I …
Continue reading "Dip your toes in some Haskell, the water is warm here!"
PCF stands for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry is an open source Platform as a Service technology. It was originally created at VMWare and open-sourced. Pivotal (which now once again is part of VMWare) has its own Cloud Foundry offering. It takes the original Cloud Foundry open source project and combines it with other tools …
Radiohead's "My Iron Lung" starts off with a short guitar intro and then the bass and drums kick in. The groove is incredibly tight with the bass and drums completely locked in and the bass lays down the foundation of the harmony underpinning the guitar lines. This is exactly the role of the bass in …
In my last post, we built a simple microservice and got quick and easy lift off to the cloud with the combination of Kotlin, Spring Cloud and PCF. This is great but there's no point taking off and not carrying any passengers. Thankfully, with PCF auto-reconfiguration, there's no more queues in the departure lounge. So, …
For me, Kotlin, Spring Boot/Cloud and Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) share a key thing in common - they make it so easy to get ideas into working, robust software as quickly as possible. PCF, like Spring Boot, takes an opinionated approach that looks after a lot of the heavy lifting required to get a suite …
A few years ago now, I developed a bit of a thing for functional programming. I explored a few different functional programming languages including Clojure, Haskell, Scala and F#. I've used Scala professionally and continue to do so to some extent in my current role. I also went full on into F# for 18 months …
