I have been doing a lot of reflection recently. I want to become a great leader – to be a servant to others, to drive myself and those in my charge towards a Just Cause that we all aspire towards. In doing this I’ve been figuring out what to focus on in order to help myself and others achieve greatness in everything we do. But if you want to be successful in leading others, you first need to be able to lead yourself. What does that even mean? Here are some ideas I’ve read about recently which really resonate with...
Continue reading...Performance Tuning Next.js
TL;DR: Next.js 9.3 introduces getStaticPaths, which allows you to generate a data-driven list of pages to render at build time, potentially allowing you to bypass server-side rendering for some use cases. You can now also use the fallback property to dynamically build pages on request, and serve the generated html instead. On a recent project we built a website for a client using a combination of Next.js and Contentful headless CMS. The goal of the website was to offer a responsive experience across all devices whilst keeping load times to a minimum and supporting SEO. I rather like Next.js –...
Continue reading...Booking a Meeting Room with Alexa – Part Two – Coding the Skill
Hey there! In my previous post Booking a Meeting Room with Alexa – Part One, I talk about how to build up the Interaction Model for your Skill using the Alexa Developer Console. Now, I’ll talk about how to write code that can handle the requests. Setting Up I chose to use JavaScript to write the skill, as I wanted to try something a little different to Java which is what I normally use. Alexa has an SDK that allows you to develop Skills in a number of languages including Java and Javascript, but also C#, Python, Go and probably...
Continue reading...Booking a Meeting Room with Alexa – Part One
Hey there! This is part one into my adventures of developing an Alexa skill. I was inspired recently on client site, where I saw they’d installed a shiny new room booking system. Each meeting room had a touch screen setup outside of it, and from it you could see who’d booked the room, and also use it to book the room out if it was available. It had the right idea, but from talking to people I learnt that it wasn’t the most user-friendly, and that it had cost a pretty penny too! I’d been looking for an excuse to...
Continue reading...Unrewarding Retros? Time to take action!
I love a good retro. It gives you an opportunity to vent, de-stress after a sprint, raise concerns but also for praise and motivation ready for the next sprint. A friendly platform for open, honest and frank discussions. But what about the venting? The frustration? Those things in your project or amongst your team that cause issues. Those hindrances that we complacently acknowledge as “just the way it is” or “nothing we can do about that for now, but we will do later…”. Most of the time they keep reappearing retro after retro, with little or no attention given to...
Continue reading...Reactive Kafka + Slow Consumers = Diagnosis Nightmare
Recently I’ve been working with the combination of Reactive Streams (in the form of Akka Streams) and Kafka, as it’s a good fit for some of the systems we’re building at work. I hope it’ll be beneficial to others to share a particular nuance I discovered whilst working with this combintion, in particular a problem with slow downstream consumers. To give a brief overview, we were taking messages from a Kafka topic and then sending them as the body of http post requests. This was working fine for the majority of the time, as we only get a message every...
Continue reading...Road to Continuous Deployment Part 1 – Performance Testing
The next set of Articles are documenting a presentation I’m working on to demonstrate Continuous Delivery, and how in a world where CD is desired, it’s becoming increasingly important for the appropriate level of testing to happen. I’ll be breaking them down to tackle one topic at a time, finally building up to a full demo on how I feel CD can work. Firstly, I’m going to start with a problem CI/CD can address – Performance Testing. Not so much on how to performance test or how CI/CD can build systems that don’t require it, but how a continuous delivery pipeline...
Continue reading...Monitoring Solutions for Scakka Applications
Over the past few days I have been looking into monitoring Scala and Akka applications, as a number of new integration projects at work are using this framework. Scakka is designed to allow easy building of concurrent applications, and is a great middle-ground for transitioning from OOP to a functional-based approach. The choices within this first investigation were between AppDynamics and a combination of Kamon, StatsD, Graphite and Graphana. So what are the two: AppDynamics (http://www.appdynamics.com): An Application Performance Management tool, capable of providing detailed analytics of a system, not just for the JVM but a variety of technologies, single...
Continue reading...Using Spotify Docker Plugin on Windows
So recently I have been looking into using Docker to automate parts of my testing and deployment, Using my lightweight CEP component (https://github.com/foyst/smalldata-cep) that uses Siddhi under the covers as a basis to develop my skills in Continuous Integration / Deployment. Currently using Windows 10 on my personal laptop and never one to give up a challenge, I finally got Docker Toolbox running on Windows with version 1.8.2, with boot2docker and Docker Quickstart Terminal. My next goal was to configure Docker builds directly to my boot2docker VM using Spotify’s Docker Maven Plugin (https://github.com/spotify/docker-maven-plugin) as a step towards Continuous Integration / Deployment. The...
Continue reading...Docker Toolbox and COMODO Internet Security
So after a couple of hours fighting trying to get the latest Docker Toolbox (1.8.2b) installed on my Windows laptop, I thought I’d share my adventure! tl;dr – disable ALL of your security software whilst installing. COMODO’s HIPS module was preventing changes being made to the file system, even though I thought I’d closed COMODO (right click and close) it was still interfering. Disabling this explicitly through the UI allowed me to install Docker Toolbox. So after opening the DockerToolbox-1.8.2b.exe and allowing all of the requests coming through COMODO, I get this error message before any sight of a Docker...
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