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Why You Need Continuous Deployment
A few weeks ago a colleague described a software development team that maintained manual testing and deployment practices. Deployment was so complex that the original developers wore completing the difficult deployment as a badge of honor. The question was: how can that team move toward a Continuous Deployment model? I confess to a shudder of…
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How to be on-call
A few years ago at Arctic Wolf I put together a talk titled “How to be on-call”, in response to the rapid growth of the organization and increasing number of on-call schedules. The talk turned out to be very popular and the recording became part of the onboarding process for new employees. While some of…
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A few words about Blameless culture
The concept of blameless culture has been around for a long time in other industries, and while the history isn’t clear, you could argue that it became an “official” part of the tech industry with the publication of the definitive book Site Reliability Engineering in 2016. My summary of blameless culture is: when there is…
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Can your operating system do this?
Have a look. This is not made up. The blurry bits are to protect the innocent. Can your operating system run for 1000 days without interruption? I doubt it.
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Hewlett & Packard
Some enterprising artisst in Silicon Valley made cardboard cutouts of various tech pioneers, including Hewlett & Packard (two inventors who started HP), attached a phone to track them, and let them out in the wild. They’ve had lots of adventures, finally ending up at HP headquarters. HP, a large corporation without a sense of humor,…
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my name in print, take 2
I wrote another article for BEA’s dev2dev site, published today! It’s about WebLogic 9.0 (released a month ago), specifically about the new JMS (Java Messaging) features. It’s available here for your perusal.
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java bytes and strings
I’m posting this code snippet here because a) it took me a while to figure it out and b) I couldn’t find anything like it out on the big bad internet. Problem: convert a 24-byte hex array (unsigned bytes) to a string, and back again. A byte can range from values 0 to 255, or…
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windows weirdness
For the past two weeks I have been unable to reach two sites from my home PC, www.dofasco.ca and www.hamiltonspectator.com. At first I thought it had something to do with both of them being in hamilton, until a quick peek at this site (if you can read Italian or at least make out what it…
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blogroll through bloglines
I’ve been using bloglines to keep track of all the news and blog sites I visit. Rather than visitting them daily or weekly bloglines subscribes to all of them (using RSS or Atom), and I only visit bloglines to see what’s new in the world. The benefits of bloglines are endless, especially when compared to…
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my name in print
I recently wrote an article for BEA’s dev2dev site about integrating something called CruiseControl with Workshop Applications. If that piques your curiosity or if you’re just wondering what I do for a living, have a look here. The really cool part is that O’Reilly (the world’s best publisher of computer books) runs the site. So…
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comment spam fix
A while back I wrote about the comment spam plague that affects a lot of blogs, including mine. One of the reasons that comment spam exists is to boost the spammer’s site rankings in Google. Some of the blog software vendors and Google have gotten together and released a way of fixing the site rankings,…
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offsets
Offsets are the plague-of-the-week in my life. At work, we’re having trouble with messaging, seems some of the message headers are messed up, some of the bytes are offset by one. It causes all sorts of havoc like messages not going where they’re supposed to and other such grief. At home, I realized all the…
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obfuscated
obfuscated: To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand The art of obfuscation in programming is very interesting, and is often done to protect vital intellectual capital. In Google’s case, as I wrote about previously, the nature of web pages demands that part of their Google Suggest code is…
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google suggest
Just when you thought Google was the answer (what’s the question?), they come up with auto-complete on a web page. Have a look here. It’s the regular Google page, except with autocomplete included. Those of you who have done any web design or programming know how difficult this is to code. There’s a good explanation…