Technology

Technology related posts

Automating data migration testing

April 12, 2020, 10 minutes to read

Data migrations are notoriously difficult to test. They take a long time to run on large datasets. They often involve heavy, inflexible database engines. And they’re only meant to run once, so people think it’s throw-away code, and therefore not worth writing tests for. Not so.

Home directory scourge

September 9, 2019, 5 minutes to read

The one-stop shop for all your user data. Home directories. Easy to backup, easy to migrate. Available since the dawn of multi-user operating systems. Am I the only one in the world who despises them?

Much software is underdeveloped

July 15, 2019, 5 minutes to read

Software can do so much more than it does today, with mature programming languages, standard instructions and not a hint of deep learning. Just plain, old, “shallow” business logic, thoughtfully implemented, relying on existing data. And it’s up to us, developers, to champion these improvements.

Structuring Terraform for world domination

June 25, 2019, 8 minutes to read

How many programmers does it take to launch an AWS EC2 instance? How about launching a hundred? With an orderly set of Terraform configurations, our four-person team looks after a worldwide set of cloud resources, with no sysadmins.

I remember

January 20, 2019, 3 minutes to read

In 2019 I’m “celebrating” twenty years since I published my first website. It was ugly, it was heavy and it was built completely with Microsoft FrontPage. Building for the web was different, very different back then, from what it is today. Our tools were young, our computers low on power and our connections slow and unreliable.

The unexciting GOTO Berlin 2017

November 19, 2017, 3 minutes to read

Unexciting. That’s the one word I would use to describe this year’s edition of GOTO Berlin. And I’m suspecting it’s a sign of advancing maturity. Just not sure whether it’s the industry’s, or my own.

Git hard or go home

February 1, 2017, 5 minutes to read

I am in love with Git. It’s the neatness junkie’s dream come true. Multiple people can code away safely, independently, then every commit can be written and rewritten at any time to end up with a tidy, coherent product. As long as you know what you’re doing, that is.

Antique inspirations for software architects

November 1, 2015, 3 minutes to read

The Roman architect Vitruvius around the year 15 BC completed his impressive, ten-volume treatise on architecture—De Architectura. It covers every possible type of man-made structure ever needed by the people of his time, but starts out wisely by prescribing basic qualities that good architecture must embody:

The state of the craft at CraftConf 2015

May 4, 2015, 7 minutes to read

CraftConf in sunny Budapest aims to be the conference in Central Europe where developers share what’s state of the art in building software. Joining the 2015 edition was an easy choice, after the first edition a year earlier received rave reviews from attendees. Three days, 16 talks and a workshop later I emerged with 6,062 words worth of notes, distilled into a few broad trends that seem to represent the edge of the industry right now.

What goes UP must come down

August 8, 2014, 4 minutes to read

Back on April 26 I reviewed my first year of wearing Jawbone UP with all its benefits and deficiencies. Two months later, on June 21, my band gave up the ghost as battery life suddenly dropped to a mere few minutes. Today I’m wearing a replacement - courtesy of Jawbone, and have a few more thoughts to share from the experience.