"Learn How to Solve Problems" entries

Are there some students who can’t learn how to code?

Change tactics or give up: It's a crossroads many teachers face when students don't understand the code.

I can never forget an evening late into a semester of my Introduction to Python course, during which I asked my students a question about user-defined classes. Here’s the code I had put on the board:


class MyClass(object):

    var = 0

    def __init__(self):                # called 
        MyClass.var = MyClass.var + 1

x = MyClass()                          # new instance created
y = MyClass()                          # new instance created

As new information for this particular lesson, I informed them that every time a new MyClass instance is created, the __init__() method is called implicitly. In other words, the code above calls __init__() twice, and in executing the code in __init__(), the variable MyClass.var is being incremented — so this is also happening twice.

So, I asked them: after the above code is executed, what is the value of MyClass.var?

The hand of this class’ most enthusiastic student shot into the air.

“One!” He answered proudly. And for a moment my mouth stood open. Read more…

4 things to make your Java 8 code more dynamic

Anytime is a good time to refactor your code.

splash_620

Java 8 has a few new features which should help you write more dynamic code. Of course one of the big features was the addition of a lambda syntax. But what about some of the other features that were added? Here are a couple of things that I tell people to do in order to make their code more dynamic and more functional.

Read more…

How reactive applications adapt

The principles of reactive applications facilitate adaptation.

pepper_moth

One of the fascinating things found in nature is the ability of a species to adapt to its changing environment. The canonical example of this is Britain’s Peppered Moth. When newly industrialized Great Britain became polluted in the nineteenth century, slow-growing, light-colored lichens that covered trees died and resulted in a blackening of the trees bark. The impact of this was quite profound: lightly-colored peppered moths, which historically had been well camouflaged and the majority, now found themselves the obvious target of many a hungry bird. Their rare, dark-colored sibling, who had been conspicuous before, now blended into their recently polluted ecosystem. As the birds, changed from eating dark-colored to light-colored moths, the previously common light-colored moth became the minority, and the dynamics of Britain’s moth population changed.

So what do moths have to do with programming? Read more…

5 reasons why Python is a popular teaching language

Python's simplicity makes it accessible to learners and teachers alike.

Download a free copy of Python in Education. Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from Python in Education, a free report written by Nicholas Tollervey.

I am going to answer a very simple question: which features of the Python language itself make it appropriate for education? This will involve learning a little Python and reading some code. But don’t worry if you’re not a coder! This chapter will hopefully open your eyes to how easy it is to learn Python (and thus, why it is such a popular choice as a teaching language).

Code readability

When I write a to-do list on a piece of paper, it looks something like this:

Shopping
Fix broken gutter
Mow the lawn  

This is an obvious list of items. If I wanted to break down my to-do list a bit further, I might write something like this:

Shopping:
    Eggs
    Bacon
    Tomatoes
Fix broken gutter:
    Borrow ladder from next door
    Find hammer and nails
    Return ladder!
Mow the lawn:
    Check lawn around pond for frogs
    Check mower fuel level 

Intuitively, we understand that the main tasks are broken down into sub-tasks that are indented underneath the main task to which they relate. This makes it easy to see, at a glance, how the tasks relate to each other.

Read more…

Open source won, so what’s next?

What to expect at OSCON 2015.

OSCON 2014 show floor

Twenty years ago, open source was a cause. Ten years ago, it was the underdog. Today, it sits upon the Iron Throne ruling all it surveys. Software engineers now use open source frameworks, languages, and tools in almost all projects.

When I was putting together the program for OSCON with the other program chairs, it occurred to me that by covering “just” open source, we weren’t really leaving out all that much of the software landscape. It seems open source has indeed won, but let’s not gloat; let’s make things even better. Open source has made many great changes to software possible, but the spirit of the founding community goes well beyond code. Read more…

4 reasons why microservices resonate

Microservices optimize evolutionary change at a granular level.

hive

We just finished the first O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference and the overwhelming most popular topic was microservices. Why all the hype about an architectural style?

Microservices are the first post-DevOps revolution architecture.

The DevOps revolution highlighted how much inadvertent friction an outdated operations mindset can cause, starting the move towards automating away manual tasks. By automating chores like machine provisioning and deployments, it suddenly became cheap to make changes that used to be expensive. Some architects properly viewed this new capability as a super power, and built architectures that fully embraced the operational aspects of their design. The Microservice architectural style prioritizes operational concerns as one of the key aspects of the architecture.

Microservice architectures borrow a design aesthetic from Domain Driven Design called the Bounded Context. A bounded context encapsulates all internal details of that domain and has explicit integration points with other bounded contexts. Microservice architectures reify the logical DDD bounded context into physical architecture. For example, it is common in microservice architectures for services that must persist data to own their database: members of the service team handle provisioning, backups, schema, migration, etc. In other words, in microservice architectures, the bounded context is also a physical context. But that also means that this service implementation isn’t coupled to any other team’s implementation, clearing the path for independent evolution. I recently published some writing about the recent realization that architecture is abstract until operationalized. In other words, until you have deployed an architecture and upgraded parts of it, you don’t fully understand it.

Read more…

The shape of software architecture

Five things we learned from the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015.

Last week, I had the opportunity to see the first Software Architecture Conference spring to life after a winter of preparation. Software architects, with or without the official title, swarmed the halls learning from speakers and attendees alike. I count myself among the people who were learning. Many notions about this profession and skill set have become clearer to me and I’m already planning to keep the content coming. I’m also in the early stages of developing out the next Software Architecture Conference (spring 2016).

Within this piece you’ll find my takeaways and lessons learned from the event. I expect these initial impressions to both shape our upcoming exploration of software architecture and be shaped by continued shifts within software architecture.
Read more…

How CI removes the pain

The tradeoffs of (accidentally) discarding continuous integration.

Engineering Practices for Continuous Delivery

I’ve given a continuous delivery workshop a few times with ThoughtWorks Chief Scientist Martin Fowler, who tells an interesting story about continuous integration, from the first software project he ever saw. When Martin was a teenager, his father had a friend who was running a software project, and he gave Martin the nickel (or five pence) tour — a bunch of men, predominately on mainframe terminals, working in an old warehouse. Martin remarked that the thing that struck him the most was when the guide told him that all the developers were “currently integrating all their code.” They had finished coding six months prior, yet despite that they weren’t sure when they were going to be done “integrating.”

That revelation surprised Martin: in his mind, software development was a discreet, scientific, deterministic process, not at all represented by the vague comments of these developers. But the practice of as-late-as-possible integration was common back in an earlier era of software development. If you look at software engineering texts of the ’60s and ’70s, every project included an integration phase. This isn’t how we think of integration today, which happens at the granularity of services and applications. Rather, a common practice was to have developers code in isolation for weeks and months at a time, then integrate all their code together into a cohesive whole. And that phase was, not surprisingly, a painful part of most projects. Yet, that type of 60s and 70s workflow is still codified in some version control tools today, even though we have now determined that late integration is the opposite of how we should approach this problem.

Read more…

3 easy reasons why you’ll move your business to the cloud

Migrating to cloud-native application architectures leads to innovation.

Editor’s note: this is an advance excerpt from Chapter 1 of the forthcoming Migrating to Cloud-Native Application Architectures by Matt Stine. This report examines how the cloud enables innovation and the changes an enterprise must consider when adopting cloud-native application architectures.

Let’s examine the common motivations behind moving to cloud-native application architectures.

Speed

It’s become clear that speed wins in the marketplace. Businesses that are able to innovate, experiment, and deliver software-based solutions quickly are outcompeting those that follow more traditional delivery models.

In the enterprise, the time it takes to provision new application environments and deploy new versions of software is typically measured in days, weeks, or months. This lack of speed severely limits the risk that can be taken on by any one release, because the cost of making and fixing a mistake is also measured on that same timescale.

Internet companies are often cited for their practice of deploying hundreds of times per day. Why are frequent deployments important? If you can deploy hundreds of times per day, you can recover from mistakes almost instantly. If you can recover from mistakes almost instantly, you can take on more risk. If you can take on more risk, you can try wild experiments—the results might turn into your next competitive advantage.

The elasticity and self-service nature of cloud-based infrastructure naturally lends itself to this way of working. Provisioning a new application environment by making a call to a cloud service API is faster than a form-based manual process by several orders of magnitude. Deploying code to that new environment via another API call adds more speed. Adding self-service and hooks to teams’ continuous integration/build server environments adds even more speed. Eventually we can measure the answer to Lean guru Mary Poppendick’s question, “How long would it take your organization to deploy a change that involves just one single line of code?” in minutes or seconds.

Imagine what your team… what your business… could do if you were able to move that fast!

Read more…

Variations in event-driven architecture

Find out if mediator or broker topology is right for you.

Editor’s note: this is an advance excerpt from Chapter 2 of the forthcoming Software Architecture Patterns by Mark Richards. This report looks at the patterns that define the basic characteristics and behavior of highly scalable and highly agile applications, and will be made available to download in advance of our Software Architecture Conference happening March 16-19 in Boston.

Coming soon.

Available now!

The event-driven architecture pattern is a popular distributed asynchronous architecture pattern used to produce highly scalable applications. It is also highly adaptable and can be used for both small and large, complex applications. The pattern is made up of highly decoupled, single-purpose event processing components that asynchronously receive and process events. 

The event-driven architecture pattern consists of two main topologies, the mediator and the broker. The mediator topology is commonly used when you need to orchestrate multiple steps within an event through a central mediator, whereas the broker topology is used when you want to chain events together without the use of a central mediator. Because the architecture characteristics and implementation strategies differ between these two topologies, it is important to understand each one to know which is best suited for your particular situation.

Read more…