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 que...

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 fo...

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...