Encrypting configuration in Apache Karaf

It’s very important to encrypt passwords or other sensitive information in configuration files. This stops attackers gaining easy access to sensitive information, limiting the way they can harm your system. This has been made easy in an OSGi environment with...

2017 in review - innovation, diversity, funerals and donkeys

Our engineering team blog has continued to grow this year, with 25 authors writing more than 40,000 words in articles across a range of topics. We’ve welcomed 17 first-time authors to the fold, with colleagues from other countries joining the...

Microsoft, .NET and not (necessarily) Windows .NET Core to write applications once and run them cross platform

Recently I looked into developing a cross platform .NET Core application. Up to a few years ago a .NET application was developed with the intention to run it on Windows. Not anymore. The landscape for .NET has changed dramatically over...

Seeking Frontend Developers

Customers, whether consumer, business, employee, partner, citizen or stakeholder, are demanding the same high grade user experience they experience from the likes of Facebook, Google and Netflix, in the applications and interactions they have with organisations every day. In the...

ffconf 2017 - Conference review

ffconf is a JavaScript conference which is held in Brighton each year. This post provides a brief summary of ffconf 2017 (held on 9 and 10 November) and links to the talks posted by the organisers. The day offered a...

Learning Gulp.js

Gulp.js is a task runner that is used to automate tasks such as compiling all your style sheets into a single file, uglifying your JavaScript and so much more. This post is going to introduce you to the world of...

Knowledge Is Dead, Long Live Learning

There’s a certain inescapable truth that people who work with technology need to face. As time goes by, the knowledge we’ve gained almost inevitably becomes obsolete. If we specialise in something, how do we deal with the fact that our...

Thoughts on SkillsMatter Meetup: Plugin Architecture Uncle Bob describes plugin architecture and why it's so powerful

I attended a SkillsMatter meetup the other day where Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin) explained some key features of clean architecture. It was a new talk and the content was taken from his new book “Clean Architecture”. It was an...

To SQL or not to SQL SQL vs NoSQL: which one should you choose?

Overview A common question that many developers and architects struggle to answer is which technology stacks should I use for my project, and more importantly why? This decision is particularly important when it comes to picking a database, as databases...

Dotnet, Docker, DevOps Docker to build, test and publish Microsoft .NET applications

Since starting on my journey down the Microsoft Open Source road, one of the things I have been introduced to is Docker. Increasingly, I have looked for opportunities where I can use Docker when developing my .NET applications. DevOps has...