Technologist blog
On the topic of service level objective values
What is the expected availability of a service API? What does a “99.9%” availability mean in the context of a service’s operation? What can a service client expect, what about a customer? ...
User inactivity and forced logout in single-sign-on scenarios
A couple incomplete thoughts and questions for those that need to automatically log end users out of web applications. ...
Creating a sleep loop in JavaScript
Today’s post is a quick tip on how to easily create a sleep-delay loop in JavaScript. ...
When to prioritize maintenance of a system
Have you ever considered a service or suite of services and thought, “that looks like a ball of yarn.” There is a tendency amongst those of us who write software for a living to consider systems that are not understood as garbage. Often, this suspicion of poorly understood systems turns out to be unwarranted. What look like obtuse decisions made for no apparent reason turn out to have solid foundation in rationality....
Quick and Dirty Teamwork
There has been a dearth of posts to this site. Part of the reason for this is that I got busy playing Overwatch by Blizzard. The underlying mechanics of the game are team based and players must work together to achieve success. Failures in the game are often due to players not working together effectively. These sorts of failures can have lessons for teams working on projects in a professional capacity; today we’ll look at a couple of team failure modes and consider ways they can be rectified. ...
On Quality
Today’s post is short essay concerning the value of development led quality. There are no code examples or short tips for things in this post. I hope you enjoy. ...
Software Development Knowledge Handoff
Today’s post will cover a couple different approaches to transfering techinical knowledge of a software system between individuals or teams. There are often transfers of ownership as a software product progresses from conception to feature development to ongoing maintainence. Effective knowledge transfers between owning individuals or teams help to ensure that ongoing development of a product is not totally stalled whenever ownership chagnes ...
Relaxing on CouchDB
Apache CouchDB 2.0 was recently released and has some compelling features for those looking for clustered document oriented databases. In today’s post I want to share a few of things that I’ve learned on how to use CouchDB’s new features and how to avoid some new user mistakes that we made along the way. ...
On why I am back to using a static site generator like hugo
Today’s post will go over some of the reasons for why I switched my personal blog back to being generated via a static generation tool from Wordpress. I have previously written about not using static content tools , we’ll look at some of the things that have changed in the last couple years with regard to complaints I had in 2014. ...
How I screwed up my website or how to not manage your content
I enjoy running my own blog at codinginthetrenches.com because I am a technologist that likes to write. Unfortunately, sometimes my interests as a technologist get the better of my interests as a writer. This last week my competitive interests resulted in my blog being visually broken for several days. Furthermore, the competition has resulted in a few select articles being mis-formatted and visually broken for much longer than a week. Today’s post is about what I’ll be doing to avoid these problems and how they can apply to your own writing platform. ...