Jake Scruggs

For backstory checkout out the previous DnD post. Landing in a pile on a large stone table in a massive room from out of a swilling green magic portal is very disorienting. However, it did lead to Lutz shaking off his magical blindness. First sight: Many intense dudes some covered in lacquer armor — Lutz didn’t even know lacquer was a thing you could make armor from. While Lutz pondered the truth of his eyesight, Lord Valparaiso threw a little fit. One: He was mighty pissed that his evil portal trap has ensnared him in addition to our heroes. Two: The portal had clearly been hijacked to another mysterious and far away land. The land was so strange and far from their home that Raest couldn’t feel his god Palore anymore which meant no spells.  Essentially this changed his role in the party from from healer/crappy fighter to, um, crappy fighter. That single set of footprints on the beach are not from Palore carrying Raest during his darkest hour.  The team had many questions bu

Recently I was interviewing a candidate for a job on my team at BackstopSolutions and he said something like: “I read your blog post about Microservices and was wondering if the lack of follow up meant the project was a failure.” He actually expressed this sentiment in a much nicer way as this was an interview but still it got me thinking:  "I should do an update on the status of our microservice and explain how it could be purely functional." The service is implemented in Clojure, uses Datomic for persistence, and integrates via REST. The service has been in production for several months now and has gone through a number of versions of its API. Implementing HATEAOS worked out well as it allows us decouple having to keep the service and front end in lock step. Since this is a microservice, we could keep both applications in step with each other as we own both ends of the interface. However this co-ordination is not without cost.  Release dates slip b/c of bugs in e

The “Curious Case of the Tiny Thieves” is being joined in progress and so a little backstory is necessary: The dexterous and rather handsome rouge Lutz was investigating these “Tiny Thieves” with his band of mostly merry adventurers: Raest a cleric of Palore, Bran the mighty barbarian, Torment the super naive atheist paladin, a wild magic user called Very Forgettable Name, and Iesha or Aida or Ada AKA: the old lady magic user who casts a lot of sleep spells. They discovered the little thieves trying to abscond with their solid gold cat statue which they received as a gift for returning a talking cat to an old lady who was really a dragon in human form — long story. Turns out the whole town hated these mini scofflaws as they has been on a veritable spree of the crime variety.  A reward was offered and pursued by our fairly fearless heroes. As far as they knew the criminals were: 6-8 inches tall, never seen in full light, and immune to sleep spells. Lutz made a super cool trap for th

Hearing that David Heinemeier Hansson had slammed microservices in his Rails Conf 2015 keynote was a bit disorienting as I was developing a microservice at the time. I leaned over to the other senior developer and said: “What’s his deal?” Toby Tripp, who had just watched the keynote, explained that when David’s team implemented microservices they had terrible trouble managing all the versions between 3 systems. “Isn’t that why we use a lookup call to get the URI-map?” I asked. “Yep” he said. “That and never remove a return key/value (pair), only add new ones until you can prove they are not used anymore” He added. I returned to adding in some caching to our service calls.  Later, I watched the video which is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlX9i9Icno David has a meandering style but he mostly discusses microservices between 43:00 and 52:00.  The “what’s in your backpack” stuff is all about his earlier zombie apocalypse metaphor that you can watch if you like. 

Recently I re-tweeted this thought from Pete Holmes: top reasons for divorce. 1984: 1. financial problems. 2. religious differences. 2014: 1. constant inclusion in group texts. 2. no wifi. — Pete Holmes (@peteholmes) September 14, 2014 because I'm in the middle of a communication crisis.  I do "knowledge work" so it’s considered inappropriate to have a device constantly making little beeps and boops while the person next to me is working on some insane LibXML (you don’t wanna know) bug.  Programming requires extreme concentration and distractions are to be avoided.  The rub of it is that I’m “on call” if our software product bursts into flames.  Therefore, I must keep my phone in a mode capable of disturbing me so I don’t eat lunch, play ping-pong, or just code right through the disastrous failure of our software.  This used to be fine back when text messages were either: Time sensitive Important From one person In first two cases the beeps my phone m

The views and opinions expressed here are my own and don’t necessarily represent positions, strategies, or opinions of Backstop Solutions Group. Recently we released episode 3 of the Software Apprenticeship Podcast but had to pull it back for re-editing because of some problems with how developers talk to each other.  Developers are not kind to ANY code.  Even our own.  Especially our own.  Sitting next to a dev while he or she discusses the code they are working on can be a shocking experience.  Words like “Crap,” “Junk”, “Garbage” and many worse are used often.  A lot of this type of talk was on episode 3 and when someone at Backstop (who’s job it is to protect us from ourselves and comments taken out of context) heard it they asked us to edit the podcast to take out some of the more offensive comments. This is why episode 3 sometimes fades into music and then comes back mid-conversation.  Sorry about that. I don’t know where I first heard the definition of developer as “Whiny Optim