Reprinted here from emails to the family from our European holiday June 2024. We have arrived in Madrid now and are settled in an Airbnb where we will stay for three nights before heading to Valencia. We’d made our way from the airport, via train to Madrid proper, by where the Airbnb accommodation is. We [...]

Recently I have been thinking more about open-source software, and I think I have come to realize something new. Possibly it is just new to me, but nevertheless, something that hadn’t occurred to me before. That realization is that open-source software, because it can be free of commercial considerations, aligns with software craftsmanship. I consider [...]

Productivity for developers is an important topic for many, the developers who want to feel productive, make great software and deliver outstanding outcomes to their users, and managers who want to know where there team needs help, and who is excelling. Individual developer productivity metrics such as SLOC (source lines of code) and SP/t (story-points [...]

With Urs Holzle speaking how could I miss the Google Cloud, Data for Sustainability, event in Auckland last week? In this post I’ll review the presented topics of Google Earth Engine, renewable energy for Google Cloud’s datacenters and how Google researcher’s datasets are providing location based insights for ESG progress. To start, the Google office [...]

Described as like unit tests for schema, Kubernetes schema validation can ensure your organization’s policies and best practices are applied consistently. This is the first in a series of posts following the OWASP Day 2022. First tip is that you can get a bunch of value using kubectl --dry-run, but beware of its modes, client [...]

Software has many attributes, some are benefits, some are costs. Often referred to as technical debt, software cruft can accumulate in a code-base making it difficult to change. I think about this problem occasionally and today I am reminded of another concept, possibly related, the tragedy of the commons. If you’re not familiar with the [...]

I found an interesting blog post about differing approaches to developing a calendar function, leading to a rabbit hole of optimization and resulting in a truly obscene one-line method. You can read the original blog post for yourself here. Had a lot of fun converting it in to C# and then profiling the performance of [...]

Azure App Service Editor has made its way in to the Azure Portal, and can live-edit a running App Service, however it is not always available and I had once wondered why. Having searched but been unable to find an answer, I can now confirm it is only available for Windows Operating System OS App [...]

This started as a slip of the tongue, a mangled idiom, but it led me on a journey of discovery. New Zealanders, perhaps like Canadians, have a high bar when it comes to being polite. Like most things this has pros and cons. One big problem with being polite to a fault is failing to [...]