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 …
Easy Boarding with Kotlin and PCF
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, …
Easy lift off with Kotlin and PCF
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 …
Persist the List
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 …
In a world full of Jiras, have we forgotten how to play?
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 …
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Keeping jazz bands valid with Scala
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 …
Dip your toes in some Haskell, the water is warm here!
Reading Time: 15 mins Reading Time with hands on trying of the examples: 30 mins approx 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 …
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Let’s Get Jammin’
One of my favorite things about F# is the ease and pleasure it brings to the otherwise tricky task of asynchronous programming. Using async workflows/computation expressions, mailbox processors (agents) and async combinators makes async, parallel and concurrent programming a total joy in F#. Outside of programming and family life, another joy of mine is listening …
Closures For OO Developers – 2 – FP in an OO Language
Reading Time 5 to 10 minutes In a previous blog post Closures For OO Developers – 1, I described how I initially thought about closures when I came to Functional Programming. I related an inner closure having access to the environment of the outer closure that created it as being conceptually similar to an inner …
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Closures For OO Developers – 1
This is the first in a series of posts that I'm writing about the concept of Closures in Functional Programming (FP for short) and how I related this concept to OO when I first came to FP and how my thinking on the concept has become more "Functional" over time. When I started making the …
