I write about my career, politics, software engineering, cycling — not all in that order. All opinions are mine.
Avoiding managed services, using Docker and running eight Mongo and twelve Kafka nodes does not make an application cloud neutral — it makes it costly to develop, Kafkaesque to architect, and impossible to maintain in production. You end up losing your weekends and quality time with family to DR exercises and production support.
On June 16th, Amazon announced they would acquire Whole Foods in what to me seems like the most exciting M&A event of the past couple of years. As a long time customer of Amazon Prime and Amazon Fresh, I couldn't be more excited at the possibilities. Of course, every other retailer is terrified. There are some … Continue reading Rather than innovating Walmart bullies their tech vendors to leave AWS
Whether my third grader becomes a software engineer when she grows up remains to be seen. The ability to customize and extend the behavior of a computer is a skill that is going to remain with her for the lifetime. If she wants to be an educator she can make educational apps. If she becomes a business person or a scientist she will be able to use computers to her advantage. This is what being a citizen developer is all about.
On May 10 Salesforce experienced a day long outage and lost four hours of customer data. As of May 14, Salesforce is still in degraded state. There is a number of lessons we can learn from this.
Nothing riles up the passions of the developer community more than pointing out that a technology is dead. Much to my surprise, Java Enterprise Edition still has fans loyal enough to get riled up . JEE as a specification may not be dead but bloated JEE application servers most certainly are and have been for well over a decade.
This article was originally published on my Cloud Power blog at Computerworld on November 10th, 2015 On October 21st, 2015, HP officially announced what many of us anticipated for months. After months of denials and flip-flopping they will shut down their HP Helion Public Cloud service. How does their SLA stack up against other cloud … Continue reading Managed IT is not the future of the cloud
This article was originally published on my blog at Computerworld on Jan 20th, 2016 Since my last post, I had an opportunity at work to take over the responsibilities over a couple of web apps. I also implemented one from scratch. I spent the last 15 years working with Java. The last time I had … Continue reading JavaScript as the language of the cloud
I am writing this article on the iPad Mini using the Editorial app. This app is connected to my Dropbox account and automatically synchronizes my work. When I come home I can continue editing on my computer where this file will be waiting for me in my Dropbox folder. When I take and share photos … Continue reading OAuth 2.0: the protocol at the center of the universe
People no longer collect music, they subscribe to it. We post thousands of photographs to Instagram and Flickr most of which get forgotten within hours from posting. We e-publish articles and blog posts, much like this one, that we know will be lost in the noise by tomorrow morning. We build apps that within weeks or days become outdated. There is hardly anything we put together today in the electronic form that is going to get discovered by our descendants a decade from now, never mind a century or a millennium.
NoSQL databases scale by adding more commodity servers. With more commodity servers come increased costs and complexities. Some NoSQL systems are better at this than others and need less.
