Industry Insights From Our Team
October 2, 2016
A mirror…It can make a difference when you’re getting ready to go out, to go to a meeting, or even to have a video conference call. Taking a look in the mirror, by itself, doesn’t fix anything. But knowing that it’s about to be show time, you take extra care. The same goes for your code. A code review process is like looking in a mirror. By itself, it fixes nothing. But knowing that the review coming up will probably cause a developer to become more conscientious over time. Since Microsoft has opened up its ecosystem to open source resources like Git. Because of […]
August 25, 2016
DevOps is a term that comes full of controversy. A lot of people are on the bandwagon, while others are waiting for the term to jump the shark, and eventually go back to business as usual. Regardless of where you are along the spectrum of loving or hating the term DevOps, one thing is certain. More and more people are using it to describe a system administrator who uses scripts, or tools like, Chef, Puppet or Ansible, in order to provision infrastructure. There is also usually an expectation of being able to deliver this in 100% cloud, or hybrid cloud environments. […]
August 15, 2016
Toolchains have become the bane of DevOps. Much like Agile, DevOps has become cramped by everyone pushing their favorite tools as the proper means to adopt a DevOps strategy. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at this periodic table of tools. How We Go Astray People cite good reasons for wanting to decentralize tools and processes: To allow for flexibility For better product management To beat competitors to the market Why Tools End up In Cemeteries It is well-worth taking the end-to-end view up front, to deliberate before making decisions. Instead of getting enamored of a tool because […]
August 15, 2016
Delta’s recent digital meltdown on August 8th has many ramifications and lessons. What could a good approach to DevOps have done to diminish it? Don’t get me wrong. I’ve worked for extremely large enterprises, and I can appreciate the innumerable number of details that go into complex, interconnected systems. I know first hand how painful it is when everyone is scrambling to bring systems back online, while trying to appease disgruntled customers on the receiving end of the problem. I’m sure that Delta, like many other companies, has articulated a DevOps philosophy. But too often, conversations about DevOps are reduced to what […]
August 11, 2016
The AWS cloud is a great option to control costs, but it doesn’t mean that all the options available to you are equally cost-efficient. Amazon is always upgrading its services, down to the presentation of the management console, depending on how far back you have been a client. Considering that EC2 is one of the most frequently used services on the platform, here’s a tip to lower the cost of maintaining it. Less Costly and Less Control If your account was created on or after the latter days of 2013, the only choice of a network platform that you have […]
August 3, 2016
Start small to get ahead faster: that’s the principle I want to share with you today. I recently got an email from someone who works at a startup. Startups are not very well-known for baking in a ton of unit testing at the beginning of a project. They are focused on getting out their minimum viable product (MVP), as well they should be. The last thing they need is to spend limited cash on bells and whistles that nobody wants. Quality, however, is neither a bell, nor a whistle. It’s what your clients will expect. As such, the person who […]
June 25, 2016
A leak is never fun. If a pipe bursts in your house, and your floor is getting ruined, should you try to find a mop, or look for a way to fix the leak? The same logic applies to making your code more maintainable, reliable and secure. During the Sonar Summer City Tour 2016 (#ssct2016), that is the message from SonarSource. The company’s product aims to analyze an application’s source code, so that quality is baked into it from the time development starts, to the time that the final product is delivered to your end clients. How is that quality expressed? It can be summarized […]
May 21, 2016
This is a quick tip to help you find and fix errors that, on the surface may appear intermittent. It’s an “oldie but a goodie” tip that I still have to get out of the toolbox on occasion for a given client. During times of frequent changes, both new and rollbacks to previous versions, you may get tripped up by the cache that controls the interaction between Visual Studio, and an on-premise version of TFS. This is particularly important for developers who are working on new code and legacy code, in older and newer versions of Visual Studio and TFS. Symptoms […]
January 13, 2016
January is a month of reckoning. We think of all the extras we bought because while we were in the store for one thing, we thought we “might as well” pick up something else. We think of every holiday party where we had “just one” extra appetizer or drink. Now people are starting to get the bills for charges they racked up during the holiday season. And we also see the scale moving in an unflattering direction, and shedding that addition is top of mind. As you begin 2016, are you considering the ways that you can also plan to […]