A number of factors have contributed to the widespread use of strings for representing complex information in computing. HTTP, a text-based protocol, and HTML, a text-based mark-up language, became the foundations of the Internet. JSON, which is essentially a formatted string of keys and values, became ubiquitous for HTTP APIs…
A joke is not funny if you have to explain it, but this essay is my attempt to explain a joke: a joke that appeals to my sense of humour, but a joke that also serves an important lesson in evolving software platforms. Sounds Like Two For over a decade,…
There is no question that modern life carries burdens incompatible with the brains we have evolved … “In a species that’s designed to live in groups of fifty to seventy, living in a group of several billion is just hard on everyone.” —Andrew Solomon quoting Randolph Nesse in “A Noonday…
This article expands on my talk Reactive Systems: The State of the Art for IoT from Reactive Summit 2020. The term “Internet of Things” was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999. After a lot of hype, we are finally seeing it come to fruition, in part due to advances in…
Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes can be used to improve the reliability of a service. If they are not used with care, however, they can do the opposite, and degrade the reliability of a service through subtle, unintended consequences. I wrote a three-part series on how to avoid "shooting…
Perhaps it has always been this way…
Since starting this blog over six years ago, my cadence has been to publish one article a month.[1] I enjoy long-form writing and it would be near impossible for me to publish essays more frequently. As I write this essay, the world is gripped by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. All…
In an earlier article, I shared an exercise that I did with my team, an exercise to identify and share our core values. The exercise was inspired by Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. The goal was to improve our self-awareness and, by sharing our core values with our colleagues,…
Last year, I read Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead. I am very fond of her book Daring Greatly. Dare to Lead covers much of the same subject matter—relationships, vulnerability, shame, being present—but I found the framing of these themes with a focus on leadership particularly valuable. The…
I spent over a decade working on a software platform for time-series data and events that is widely used in industry. It supports a diverse set of applications—like supply-chain management, condition-based maintenance, regulatory compliance, and process monitoring, optimization, and control—in industries including manufacturing, power generation, utilities, oil and…
This article is the companion to my article On Eliminating Error in Distributed Software Systems and expands on my talk What Lies Between: The Challenges of Operationalising Microservices from QCon London 2019. In an earlier article, I explored techniques for eliminating error in distributed software systems, including testing, the type…