Lessons Learned From Austin Energy
Reflections on Our Latest Blackout This one goes out to our Austin-Area colleagues. Around the office (and over the phone) we have been discussing the events of the past week or two – finally power is restored across town after a classic February cold-snap. It’s true that the ice storm we saw recently was unique, […]
DevOps Metrics: Key Elements of Continuous Monitoring
Our previous blogs have defined DevOps as a collaborative culture with its own defined practices, ideas, tools, technology, processes, and metrics. Integrating some of these elements into your workflow can help streamline and improve your development process. Today, I want to focus on metrics that we associate with DevOps. Read on to learn more about […]
Continuous Monitoring: What Is It, And How Does It Impact DevOps Today?
DevOps has made it possible for organizations to develop and release stable applications faster than ever. However, an organization with a proper DevOps pipeline should always include Continuous Monitoring through the development lifecycle. Continuous Monitoring (CM) is a fully automated process that provides real-time data in all stages of an organization’s DevOps pipeline. This data […]
Big Data, Fast Data, and Machine Learning
While it may seem I’m just trying to work in as many buzzwords as I can, in fact, there really is an important intersection of these three elements. I’ve been interested in both big data and fast data for several years, and my newest tech interest is machine learning. As I have learned about the latter, […]
Breaking an Application into Microservices
I recently started a new greenfield project, where the decision was to use a microservices-based architecture. The application was pretty well defined, including most of the data model, since there was a working prototype, so my biggest first concern was how to break it up appropriately into microservices. I’ve participated in this process before, including […]
Test Driven Development
Test Driven Development (TDD) is a development practice where developers author code by first describing the intended functionality in small, automated tests, then writing the necessary code to make that test pass. TDD came out of the Extreme Programming (XP) process and movement in the late 90’s and early 00’s that sought to maximize rapid feedback mechanisms […]
I Have a “Killer Idea” And Now I Need Software…
Every day, a million and one thoughts fly around in our heads. Sometimes, they’re killer ideas — the ones we think will make us never have to work again for the rest of our lives. Other times, they are just products of a very overactive imagination. However, we know that it is one thing to […]
DevOps Methodology Explained: Why is DevOps Right For Your Organization?
In the last decade, we have seen significant shifts in software development operations. One of these shifts is the evolution of DevOps, which came to play in 2008/9. Even as organizations continue to adopt the practice, DevOps is still considered an extra when it needs to be a fundamental. In this article, we are going […]
Approaches for Generating Realistic Test Data
In this post, I’m going to discuss some approaches to obtain realistic Test Data without compromising the security of any customer’s sensitive data. In the world of health care software, this is referred to as Personal Health Information (PHI), but the concept exists in financial software, document management, … really, everything. Why is Realistic Test […]
Challenges of Data Migration
In my last blog, I talked about how we estimate new projects, and I included the offhand comment that Data Migration is always harder than you think it will be. The purpose of this blog is to provide a few examples of why I find this to be the case. What is Data Migration? Data […]
