A software engineer's journey
I've really been feeling the love for Go recently. I love its simplicity. I love its superb developer experience. I love how my tests run faster and my microservices spin up faster then I can blink! I love that it has so many utilities that I need for creating microservices built in to its standard …
Continue reading "Golang dev with Kubernetes, Helm and Skaffold"
In a previous blog post I talked about modelling business rules with types. I introduced a concept called Algebraic Data Types (ADTs). This is a concept I used a lot in 2017/2018 when I was programming in F# a lot - for my day job and side-projects. In F#, ADTs are provided by what are …
There are many benefits to microservices. One of my favourites is how they enable teams to work independently and to continuously deploy to production. However, there is a lot to think about: how do we make them resilient and fault-tolerant? how can they scale elastically and cost-effectively? how do they find each other and/or the …
(Originally published in December 2020 - moved here from 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 gets …
Continue reading "Model View Events with Action Replay — No Frameworks Allowed"
“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 …
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 …
Tom Prior 