Archive for the ‘software’ Category
The GraphQL Way
TL;DR From a short time using GraphQL APIs I sense that there’s a ‘GraphQL Way’ for how things should be. A set of promises that the technology makes to its users. But those promises are frequently being broken, or at least undermined, as people rush to create GraphQL end points without perhaps investing enough time […]
Filed under: software, technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: API, documentation, examples, filtering, GraphQL, samples, self describing
The @ Company uses a lot of SSL certificates, and we’ve been using ZeroSSL and its Certbot wrapper zerossl-bot to automate how we manage certs. But we wanted more control over the process, which has driven us towards the ZeroSSL API. Sadly the docs don’t provide usage examples, which has made it quite a journey […]
Filed under: howto, software | 2 Comments
Tags: API, automation, bash, certificate, curl, Digital Ocean, jq, json, python, script, SSL, ZeroSSL
TL;DR Best practice gets encoded into industry leading software (and that happens more quickly with SaaS applications). So if you’re not using the latest software, or if you’re customising it, then you’re almost certainly divergent from best practices, which slows things down, makes it harder to hire and train people, and creates technology debt. Background […]
Filed under: cloud, software | Leave a Comment
Tags: best practice, Kubernetes, processes, saas
Further thoughts on TornadoVM
TornadoVM was definitely the coolest thing I learned about at QCon London last week, which is why I wrote up the presentation on InfoQ. It seems that people on the Orange web site are also interested in the intersection of Java, GPUs and FPGA, as the piece was #1 there last night as I went […]
Filed under: software | Leave a Comment
Tags: compiler, FPGA, Go, golang, GPU, java, JIT, TornadoVM, VM
Marginal cost of making mistakes
In a note to my last post ‘Safety first‘ I promised more on this topic, so here goes… TL;DR As software learns from manufacturing by adopting the practices we’ve called DevOps we’ve got better at catching mistakes earlier and more often in our ‘production lines’ to reduce their cost; but what if the whole point […]
Filed under: code, culture, software | Leave a Comment
Tags: architecture, cost, design, DevOps, economics, mistakes, risk
The compiler will not save you
…at least not in an embedded environment. There’s a commonly held myth in modern software development that compilers are smarter than people at optimising code for its eventual runtime environment. By extension there’s no point in writing efficient code, because your idea of efficient code might not actually be all that efficient, and any time […]
Filed under: code, software | 2 Comments
Tags: binary, c, compiler, microcontroller, msp430, optimisation, size
Do VMs dream of real networks?
With apologies to Philip K. Dick. This post is going to address three topics: The relationship between a virtual machine (VM) and its network connection(s). The changing perimeter The role of APIs in controlling network configuration The common theme is dreams, or perhaps de/re(ams) – as the last two topics touch on whether something is de- or […]
Filed under: cloud, software | Leave a Comment
Tags: cloud, define, defined, deperimiterisation, deperimiterization, networking, perimeter, refine, refined, reperimiterisation, reperimiterization, SDN, software, virtualisation, virtualise, virtualization, virtualize, VLAN, VM, VMs
DevOps is really about design
I the early part of the ‘unpanel’ session at last night’s post Cloud Expo London CloudCamp there was a good deal of debate about DevOps and what it means. Some people talked about new skill mixes, others talked about tools. These are I think simply artefacts. The more fundamental change is about design. At the risk […]
Filed under: architecture, cloud, software | 1 Comment
Tags: cloud, cloudcamp, design, DevOps, maintenance, manufacture, maturity, paas, purpose, saas
My friend Randy Bias very kindly came in and did a web conference presentation at work this week on his views of cloud computing (which are well summarised in a post he did at the end of last year). Inevitably the topic of security came up, and Randy, drawing on his past experience in the […]
Filed under: architecture, cloud, security, software | 6 Comments
Tags: audit, bolt on, build in, cloud, compliance, firewall, gateway, iaas, paas, schema, security, validation, xml
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