Microservices Gotchas

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti Microservice, far from it. Come and ask me and I’ll give you a lot of reasons why they can benefit any development project. And there are plenty of posts on the web and...

When It's Clever to Admit That You're Not Feeling Clever

On the first day of my first professional job, an experienced colleague gave me a piece of advice which has served me well for many years: Admit it when you don’t know the answer Simplistically, this works because it prevents...

Risk Burndown

Few Agile approaches actively manage risk. There are some tools to help with risk, such as sprints, Definition of Done, etc. but there are few tools that are explicit about risk. Risk burndown is an approach I have used to...

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...