As the family has gone back to school September seems to have whizzed by, with fewer interesting things to report on as life settles back to a weekly routine. I’ve mentioned the punctuations of comedy nights and online whisky tastings before, so there’s little new to report…

Frontline Live

My amazing friend Katz Kiely set up Frontline Live in the early days of the pandemic to help frontline health workers get access to desperately needed personal protective equipment (PPE).

As things have settled down she thought that the site should be backed by a registered charity, which I’m pleased to say I’m now a trustee for (after it got set up in what seemed like record breaking time – about a day and a half from submitting the docs to getting approval).

Covatar

My colleague Caitlin McDonald got an awesome new profile pic from Covatar. So I got one for myself. What do you think?

Tech stuff

Dapr

I got to know Mark Chmarny during his time at Google, but he’s now at Microsoft working on Azure stuff and he suggested I take a look at Dapr. It’s described as ‘An event-driven, portable runtime for building microservices on cloud and edge.’, and there’s a bunch of good samples and examples for it on GitHub, which provides an easy on ramp for people to get started.

NATS

Long time readers of this blog will know that I’ve been a fan of asynchronous messaging and event driven architectures since the early 2000s as the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) took shape. I first met Derek Collison as he did due diligence on VMware’s acquisition of RabbitMQ, and he’s somebody who’s been into messaging since pretty much the beginning, as Tibco created Rendezvous and then Enterprise Message Service (EMS nee E4JMS).

NATS came along as Derek was creating Apcera, and since the sale of that platform he’s focussed all of his attention on the messaging platform.

I remain convinced that most of the complexity in enterprise architectures comes from people using HTTP in places where it’s just not suitable (then having to layer on all types of guff to make up for that). I’d previously hoped that AMQP would provide salvation, and at one stage the ubiquity of RabbitMQ underlying infrastructure software fooled me that it had happened. But the complexity seems to be piling on above the platforms again, so I’m hoping that NATS can help people get back to simpler and cleaner architectures.

Raspberry Pi stuff

I wrote a while ago about booting my Pi4 from a USB3 attached SSD. This post from Jeff Geerling provides a deeper look at UASP, TRIM and performance.