Why Microservices Are Right For Us

I posted previously about the fact we’re “doing” Microservices. At that time I was hedging pretty extensively (as various commenters pointed out). This was predominantly because we we’re pathfinding (or at least broadening the paths for the rest of us...

Drupal, Symfony and friends

There are thousands of situations in which you do not want to reinvent the wheel. It is a well known principle in Software Engineering, but not always well applied/known into the Drupal world. Let’s say for example, that you have...

An Introduction to VirtualBox

What is my aim with this post? It is to give you a good introduction to Oracle’s VirtualBox so you know all about it and what it can do. This is not a tutorial on how to install it and...

Drupal 8 PSR-4 Form compatibility in Drupal 7

Up until Drupal 8 there has been little to encourage well organised code. It now has PSR-4 autoloading so your classes are automatically included. Even though Drupal 8 is just round the corner, a lot of us will still be...

Drupal 8 in 2 steps

Drupal 8 is the latest version of Drupal, a modern, PHP 5.4-boasting, REST-capable, object-oriented powerhouse. The concepts are still the same as the previous versions but the approach is now different. Drupal 8 comes with a modern Object Oriented Programming...

Little's Law and KanBan

This post delves into Little’s Law and how it relates to KanBan for software development. Understanding these concepts and their relationship will help agile practitioners improve the delivery pipeline, in particular by knowing what to measure and inspect. (Software engineers...

Solving problems being technology agnostic

We are used to building systems and solving problems under high quality requirements as developers. When you are creating a whole system with its own behaviour and idiosyncrasy your solution is probably going to have some specific characteristics due to...

Pair Programming and Budō

Confession time: I find pair programming hugely useful, productive, informative - and draining. Like many developers of my acquaintance, I’m an introvert; which doesn’t mean I don’t like people, just that I am less than enthused about spending hours at...

Agile Analogies for Software Development

I’ve recently been working in a training role, with people who have never been exposed to the software engineering lifecycle before. I was drawn to considering analogies to try and explain to them what we were trying to do. It...

Automation as a way of thinking... and docker

Automation is a key and essential fact when solving problems and assembling pieces together. By automating you only need to do the same thing once, reducing the possibility of human errors so it helps to increase quality, efficiency and productivity...