Colin Breck

If you will allow me to continue my self-indulgent podiatric joke: startup probes allow you to get your feet underneath you.

This is an essay about reflecting on our values to understand what drives them in order to separate our core values from these other strong drivers.

An exercise in exploring, identifying, expressing, and sharing our core values.

A shared-nothing approach to server replication, notably one that incorporates a shared, distributed journal, is a far more reliable, flexible, and powerful approach, particularly for systems focused on time-series and events.

Guarantees do not compose into complex systems.

Combining actors and streams can make problems simpler, with less code to test and maintain, and with a more natural separation of concerns.

I review techniques for eliminating error in software and explain why they are not jointly sufficient for eliminating error in distributed software systems.

While these sketches are useful for lightening the mood and having a laugh, I think they also provide relevant commentary for understanding engineers and engineering work.

Reimagining a paginated API as a streaming workload.

The Akka Streams API is one of my favourite tools for building reactive, distributed applications. If you are not familiar with it, I published an article on the motivations [https://blog.colinbreck.com/akka-streams-a-motivating-example/] for using the Akka Streams API, as well as an article on

Most enterprises make extensive use of open-source software. Many are attracted by the price: free. Free from the perspective of some people, anyway. Most enterprises also purchase a lot of commercial software and services. I want to explore how licensing terms often discourage using the software most effectively—encouraging

I expand on these ideas in my presentation Kubernetes Probes: How to Avoid Shooting Yourself in the Foot. Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes are mechanisms to improve service reliability and availability. For example, if a container is unresponsive, restarting the container can make the application more available, despite the defect.

I expand on these ideas in my presentation Kubernetes Probes: How to Avoid Shooting Yourself in the Foot. Previously, I wrote an essay describing how Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes can unintentionally reduce service availability, or result in prolonged outages. In the conclusion of that essay, I highlighted Lorin'

This article expands on a keynote [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifaqjop1gzU] that I gave at Reactive Summit 2018. I also discussed these topics on the Real-World Architecture Panel [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/architectures-panel] at QCon San Francisco 2018. An operational technology combines hardware and software

I expand on these ideas in my presentation Kubernetes Probes: How to Avoid Shooting Yourself in the Foot. Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes can be used to make a service more robust and more resilient, by reducing operational issues and improving the quality of service. However, if these probes are

Services that incorporate streaming workloads often need to perform asynchronous requests to other services, or execute long-running, asynchronous operations. Examples include, inserting time-series data into a database, retrieving metadata for data enrichment, and executing complex business-workflows. Executing asynchronous operations in a streaming context, while maintaining backpressure in

When I was in elementary and secondary school, I did not enjoy reading or writing. Both were a chore. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that the rote learning and clerical curriculum that is core to modern, institutional education, was just not right for me. I

You have probably had the experience of working tirelessly on a challenging, high-profile, business-critical project, for a significant period of time, chasing the satisfaction of completing the project successfully, only to have it be suddenly finished, completed with very little fanfare, or the gratifying catharsis that you were

I have never had an internship. In fact, while I was an undergraduate in university, I never even had a summer job related to engineering or software development. I worked at a living-history museum [https://www.forthenry.com/] for three summers, giving guided tours, performing artillery demonstrations, and playing

I expand on these concepts in my Scale by the Bay presentation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzosGtjJdPg]. In an earlier article [https://blog.colinbreck.com/maximizing-throughput-for-akka-streams/], I detailed a number of techniques that can be used to maximize the throughput for individual Akka Streams.