Blog
Little’s Law
Published 2019-12-20Little’s law was first published in 1954. It wasn’t proven true until 1961 and the proof was simplified in 1972. This just about pre-dates iterative development methods and certainly pre-dates the Agile manifesto (2001). It’s from the same period as Toyota’s production system which gave us several g...
Lies, Damn Lies and Metrics
Published 2019-12-06When working towards an objective or goal there are often some measurements taken to try to indicate progress. These indicator measurements (shortened to just metrics) will be either leading or lagging indicators and it’s important to understand the difference. Key Performance Indicators Indicators ...
Product Owners and GDPR
Published 2018-08-03If you don’t know what the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are then where have you been hiding. It’s responsible for the piles of email most people recently received about updated privacy policies and consent requests. Whatever you think of GDPR, it’s now law across the European Union (E...
Technology On the Edge
Published 2017-10-10I’ve often used three phrases to describe the state of advancement of some piece of technology and recently realised that while two are well known the third is not. Most people have heard of “Cutting Edge” and “Bleeding Edge” but rarely “Beyond the Edge”. Here are my definitions of these terms, your...
Estimating Stories
Published 2017-04-30There are several approaches to software development that require the estimation of work items, many of these approaches call work items, stories or tasks. To keep this post applicable to various approaches I’ll simply refer to work items. There are many approaches and guides about how to do estimat...
JIT Design
Published 2017-04-24Just in time design is about designing something just before the design is needed. Do it any later and it’ll be implemented without any design thought, do it too soon and the design could be miss-informed. Premature Optimisation This is an often cited sin of software creation. It’s really just a sub...
Designing APIs vs Consuming APIs
Published 2016-07-16Most APIs are described as being RESTful but many really aren’t. Fortunately understanding about what RESTful really means is becoming more common. The one area that seems to still hold debate is HATEOAS. Should an API be described to its consumers with documentation or should they discover it throu...
Long time no post
Published 2016-07-15Well my hosting company Anynines went down and I was lazy about relocating my blog to a new host. I’m still a fan of AnyNines but I’m now wary of their dev hosting and a little disappointed they never did a post-mortem of the outage. I considered GitHub Pages but I want to have comments and I’m not ...
Simple vs Easy
Published 2015-09-28This blog post is inspired by a wonderful and entertaining video called Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey. It explains the difference between easy & simple, and why we’re obsessed with the wrong one. It’s a sentiment I’ve known for a long time but I’ve never seen it put in to words before. The res...
Firefox extensions with Travis CI
Published 2015-09-09Developing an extension for Firefox is no different than developing anything else and CI is a good idea. It’s actually very easy to use Travis to run your test suite. For those that don’t know, Travis is a great resource for running CI on your open source projects for free. Travis will install any v...
Sample Apps for Cloud Foundry
Published 2015-07-03Working on the Java Buildpack means lots of testing with unit (over 99% coverage) and integration tests, but we also have a suite of sample applications to do complete system wide testing. They are all tested during our CI builds and might be useful for people that want to play around with different...
Configuring the Cloud Foundry Java Buildpack
Published 2015-04-02Until now the preferred way to make changes to the Java Buildpack has been to fork it and edit one of the yaml files in the config directory. If a bigger change is required then the code has to be edited directly. For a configuration change forking can be a pain so there is a new feature that allows...
Session Replication on Cloud Foundry
Published 2014-08-22I’ve done a short blog post about the new support for using Redis to do session replication on Cloud Foundry with the Java Buildpack. It’s been posted over on the Pivotal Blog, give it a read....
Cloud Foundry Video Shorts
Published 2014-08-11Firstly, CloudFoundry has a shiny new logo. It’s a little more abstract, harder to understand at first glance but I like it, much cleaner. I’ve done two short videos demoing some new features in the Cloud Foundry Java Buildpack with my finest monotone voice. The first is about using New Relic, it’s...
Checking in Bower dependencies
Published 2014-06-03I’ve seen a few places recommending that the bower_components folder should be checked in to your version control system. This is wrong, it will just add unnecessary bloat to your repo and risk your dependencies going stale. The only good reason I think of is to avoid having to run bower install all...
Strict JavaScript for NodeJS
Published 2014-03-28This post is mostly a short reminder for myself as it’s contents is not new. As many of you probably know NodeJS runs on top of Google’s V8 engine, the same JavaScript engine used in the Chrome browser. V8 can take quite a few configuration options, try listing them out. I’m going to talk about the ...
NodeJS on Cloudfoundry - New Buildpack
Published 2014-03-27Since my last post about monitoring NodeJS applications on CF (CloudFoundry) things have changed, both the NodeJS and CF worlds are fast moving ones. The default Node buildpack is currently a fork of the Heroku one, so most things explained here are relevant to Heroku as well. You no longer require...
Monitoring Node Apps on CloudFoundry
Published 2013-12-06There are a few options for monitoring Node applications including NewRelic and NodeTime but I’ll be looking at StrongOps (previously known as NodeFly) by StrongLoop. It’s easy to get up and running with both NewRelic and NodeTime but the StrongLoop offering is particularly easy on CloudFoundry tha...
Gemini & Virgo moving on
Published 2013-08-24Gemini Management 2.0 has been out for some time and is spec compliant with the OSGi alliance Enterprise 5.0 JMX specification. The project is very much in maintenance mode pending changes to the specification or bugs. I am moving on to new things and while I’m very sad to be leaving behind the wo...
New Web Admin Console In Virgo
Published 2012-09-25Virgo 3.6.0.M01 has been released and it contains a new web admin console. While visually it appears very similar to the existing web console it has some new features and under the covers a lot has changed. New Features The OSGi explorer has been replaced with a graphical view that shows both the se...
Gemini Management 2.0.0.M01
Published 2012-09-14Gemini Management is an implementation of the OSGi Enterprise JMX specification. The 2.0.x line moves up to version 5.0 of the specification with several improvements and a new MBean. Gemini Management now includes and re-exports the ’org.osgi.jmx’ packages from the 5.0 specification meaning you do...
Gemini Management, soon...
Published 2011-12-12Gemini Management is a set of JMX MBeans for managing your OSGi runtime. We released the first Milestone last week and will hopefully do a full release in the near future. Gemini Management implements the JMX Specification Version 1.0 of the OSGi Service Platform Enterprise Specification, Version 4...
Virgo 3.0 (Maya) RC2
Published 2011-08-04The second Release Candidate of Virgo 3.0 (Maya) is available for download. See the release notes for details. RC2 has minor updates from RC1. The documentation has been finished and is now also frozen for release. The version of Equinox has been updated to the stable Indigo version. The separate...
Extending Virgo with a HttpService
Published 2011-03-29Several people have asked about us providing a packaging of Virgo that includes the OSGi HttpService. We don’t have any plans to do so because it’s so easy to extend Virgo with extra function yourself. I’m using the Equinox HttpService as the desired extra function here but the same approach applies...
Eclipse Summit Europe 2010
Published 2010-11-05Between moving house and going on a long holiday my personal projects went a little quiet but I’ve been at the Eclipse Summit in Europe in Ludwigsberg this week so I thought I’d write up my thoughts. This was my first ‘big’ Eclipse event, on the one hand it’s nice to have so many knowledgeable peopl...
Eclispe Sofia DemoCamp
Published 2010-07-21I went to Sofia to present at an Eclipse Demo Camp and seems it went down well with at least one of the attendees. http://javamissionary.blogspot.com/2010/06/eclipse-democamp-2010.html. The ‘young’ comment made me chuckle. It’s all well and good looking youthful but it’s a pain when you want some gr...
IDE support for OSGi grows
Published 2010-06-27The SpringSource Tools Suite (STS) has offered support for OSGi development for a long time, IntelliJ also has good support and even better specific support for dm Server was added in May. Now NetBeans has released version 6.9 with a lot of new OSGi related features. It’s really encouraging to see a...
Book: A Practical Guide to Information Architecture
Published 2010-06-23At the beginning of the year I took a few days to review a book about Information Architecture (IA). I’m certainly not a technical reviewer having no experience of IA but reading the drafts in enough detail to be useful to the author was an enjoyable experience. I picked up a lot more than I normal...
The First Milestone of Virgo is out
Published 2010-06-17Yesterday I started Virgo milestone 2.1.0.M01 copying round the Eclipse mirror servers. It’s really good to see it go and I’m looking forward to seeing the response later today. The official blog post by Glyn Normington is on the SpringSource Team Blog. The Virgo Kernel is also available along with...
Hello world!
Published 2010-06-14Well I have finally got my website up, really enjoying the new features in Wordpress 3.0. Once I get better at the image creation my own Theme will appear as well. I’ve learnt a lot about Inkscape but I haven’t played with the perspective support yet and I have something 3D in mind. So many blog pos...