I recently finished reading Open: An Autobiography by tennis legend Andre Agassi. It was an entertaining book but I also came away with a few lessons and reminders for my own life that I’ll share here.
To Cloud or Not to Cloud
Recently, there was an article circulating about how 37signals is migrating away from the cloud. This can seem counter-intuitive when there is so much information touting the benefits of running in AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. However, the decision to run in the cloud or on your own hardware is a complex one. Let’s break down the pros and cons:
The Lessons of Sport
Sports are often used as a metaphor for larger life lessons. The athletes we watch on TV or in person are inspirational in what they are able to accomplish and what they sacrifice to perform at the level they do.
I’ve never been much of a sports nut, but I’ve been active most of my life with a variety of outdoor activities and sports. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized the lessons I learned from sports were the lessons of life. As Billie Jean King said, “Sports teaches you character, it teaches you to play by the rules, it teaches you to know what it feels like to win and lose-it teaches you about life.”
The lessons of sport are the lessons of life.
Service Monitoring Strategies
If a service falls in the forest and there is nothing around to notice, does the service exist?
By now you’ve likely heard myself or others chant the refrain that your services need good monitoring. This is especially true if you’re building out a microservice architecture. Knowing when your services are unhealthy is key to reducing the downtime of your systems.
But what does it mean to monitor a system?
Today I’ll describe three ways to monitor your services.
Effective Exception Handling
Do you want to be an exceptional programmer? If so, you should learn how to throw and handle exceptions properly.
Most modern programming languages support some form of exception handling. Exceptions are a construct that allow you to bypass the normal flow of the program and send an error to a higher level within the call stack.
Exceptions are a powerful tool. But like any tool, they can be abused. Let’s look at three ways to use exceptions properly.
Reviving the Blog: Part 4 - Image Sizing
While a blog may be mostly text, images play a big part as well. Good imagery can draw attention to an article or convey an idea more clearly than text alone.
This blog is no exception.
After importing the blog from WordPress, it’s time to deal with the images.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
Many of us remember learning, as a child, Aesop’s fable of The Tortoise and the Hare. In the story, the slow, plodding Tortoise wins a race against the fast, agile Hare. The moral is that steady, consistent progress can outwit and outperform the faster, but inconsistent competitor.
In these modern times, this fable is more relevant than ever. The noise coming in from social media, television, and the shiny blue links of the internet, it’s incredibly easy to get distracted like the Hare.
However, with these three strategies, you can achieve your goals and become the victorious Tortoise.
Cloud Computing is Containers
Are you new to cloud development? Maybe feeling a little intimidated by what it all means? If you’ve been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or the like for a while, have you ever stopped to think about what working in “the cloud” really means?
When you understand the fundamentals of what cloud development is, building software solutions becomes a lot easier.
3 Reasons to Use Immutable Objects
Have you ever had to debug a weird, inconsisten problem that ended up being a race condition? Perhaps you had an object that got into an invalid state? Have you had an object grow and grow until memory has been exhausted?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, the solution may be immutable objects.
Reviving the Blog: Part 3 - Importing from WordPress
A blog isn’t terribly interesting unless it has content. Now that I have selected a platform and set it up, it’s time to import the content from my old blog. So how does one import the nearly 60 articles I wrote over the course of a year or so from WordPress into the new platform?