- awesomplete — MIT-licensed ultra lightweight, usable, beautiful autocomplete with zero dependencies in Javascript.
- How to Seize the Opportunities when Megatrends Collide — excuse the cheesy title, the chart from PwC showing pairwise combination of trends, is interesting.
- Adopting Microservices at Netflix: Lessons for Architectural Design — you want to think of servers like cattle, not pets. If you have a machine in production that performs a specialized function, and you know it by name, and everyone gets sad when it goes down, it’s a pet. Instead you should think of your servers like a herd of cows. What you care about is how many gallons of milk you get. If one day you notice you’re getting less milk than usual, you find out which cows aren’t producing well and replace them. People for Ethical Treatment of Iron, your time has come!
- Your Job is Not to Write Code (Laura Klein) — I know what you’re thinking. This will all take so long! I’ll be so much less effective! This isn’t true. You’ll be far more effective because you will actually be doing your job. Amen to it all.
"microservices" entries
Signals from the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015
From careers to culture to code, here are key insights from the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015.
Experts from across the software architecture world came together in Boston for the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015. Below we’ve assembled notable keynotes, interviews, and insights from the event.
Software architects: post-“post-useful”
The old notion of a software architect being a non-coding, post-useful deep thinker is giving way to something far more interesting, says Neal Ford, software architect and meme wrangler at ThoughtWorks. “Architecture has become much more interesting now because it’s become more encompassing … it’s trying to solve real problems rather than play with abstractions.”
Four short links: 26 February 2015
Autocompletion, Colliding Trends, Microservices, and Writing Useful Code
Four short links: 22 January 2015
MSVR, The Facebook, Social Robots, and Testing Microservices
- Microsoft HoloLens Goggles (Wired) — a media release about the next thing from the person behind Kinect. I’m still trying to figure out (as are investors, I’m sure) where in the hype curve this Googles/AR/etc. amalgam lives. Is it only a tech proof-of-concept? Is it a games device like Kinect? Is it good and cheap enough for industrial apps? Or is this the long-awaited climb out of irrelevance for Virtual Reality?
- The Facebook (YouTube) — brilliant fake 1995 ad for The Facebook. Excuse me, I’m off to cleanse.
- Natural Language in Social Robotics (Robohub) — Natural language interfaces are turning into a de-facto interface convention. Just like the GUI overlapped and largely replaced the command line, NLP is now being used by robots, the Internet of things, wearables, and especially conversational systems like Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, Nuance’s Nina, Amazon’s Echo and others. These interfaces are designed to simplify, speed up, and improve task completion. Natural language interaction with robots, if anything, is an interface. It’s a form of UX that requires design.
- Microservices and Testing (Martin Fowler) — testing across component boundaries, in the face of failing data stores and HTTP timeouts. The first discussion of testing in a web-scale world that I’ve seen from The Mainstream.
Four short links: 22 September 2014
OS X Javascript, Social Key Party, E-Fail, and Microservices Testing
- Significance of Javascript For OS X Scripting — not just for shell scripting-type automation, now you can build Cocoa applications with Javascript. This is huge.
- keybase.io — social media as trust vector.
- I Banned E-Mail At My Company — Email should not be used to share information. Especially if that information is a resource that might be useful again in the future.
- Building Microservices at Karma — The biggest challenge with microservices is testing. With a regular web application, an end-to-end test is easy: just click somewhere on the website, and see what changes in the database. But in our case, actions and eventual results are so far from another that it’s difficult to see exact cause and effect. A problem might bubble up from a chain, but where in the chain did it go wrong? It’s something we still haven’t solved.
Four short links: 14 August 2014
Ceramic 3D Printing, Robo Proofs, Microservice Fail, and Amazing Graphics Tweaks
- $700 Ceramic-Spitting 3D Printer (Make Magazine) — ceramic printing is super interesting, not least because it doesn’t fill the world with plastic glitchy bobbleheads.
- Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine (Arxiv) — a survey of mathematical proofs that rely on computer calculations and formal proofs. (via Victoria Stodden)
- Failing at Microservices — deconstructed a failed stab at microservices. Category three engineers also presented a significant problem to our implementation. In many cases, these engineers implemented services incorrectly; in one example, an engineer had literally wrapped and hosted one microservice within another because he didn’t understand how the services were supposed to communicate if they were in separate processes (or on separate machines). These engineers also had a tough time understanding how services should be tested, deployed, and monitored because they were so used to the traditional “throw the service over the fence”to an admin approach to deployment. This basically lead to huge amounts of churn and loss of productivity.
- Transient Attributes for High-Level Understanding and Editing of Outdoor Scenes — computer vision doing more amazing things: annotate scenes (e.g., sunsets, seasons), train, then be able to adjust images. Tweak how much sunset there is in your pic? Wow.