The Hidden Tax of Frameworks: Less is More in Software Development
Early in my career, I viewed frameworks as magical solutions to complex problems—drop in a dependency, import a few packages, and suddenly you have authentic...
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The Invisible Deficit: How Remote Work is Undermining the Development of Junior Engineers
The post-pandemic embrace of remote work has fundamentally altered the landscape of professional environments across industries. While the flexibility and wo...
Generative AI: The Quiet Revolution in Network Automation
Networking has always been a domain where automation arrives fashionably late to the party. While software developers have enjoyed increasingly sophisticated...
Can Innovation Truly Happen in Large Companies?
The conventional wisdom suggests that true innovation belongs to the domain of nimble startups and small companies. Large organisations, with their bureaucra...
Beyond Tracing: Why Logging Remains Essential in Modern Observability
The rise of distributed tracing has fundamentally changed how we understand application behaviour in complex systems. With platforms like Datadog offering so...
AI Coding Assistants: A Cautionary Perspective on Automation in Development
The rise of AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Cursor marks a significant shift in how software is developed. While these tools undoubtedly offer p...
Git Branching: When Less is More
After years in network engineering and software development environments, I’ve observed a troubling but rarely discussed reality: a significant proportion of...
Go vs Python: A Network Engineer’s Perspective
After years of championing Go for network automation and infrastructure projects, I’ve recently dipped my toes into Python. While Python’s ubiquity in the ne...
LLM as Judge: Evaluating Complex Network Intelligence Systems
Modern network management systems increasingly leverage AI to interpret vast telemetry datasets, predict potential failures, and suggest remediation actions....
Function Calling with LLMs: Bridging the Gap Between AI Reasoning and Action
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been primarily focused on generating human-like text—answering questions, writing content, and synthesising...
Domain Storytelling: A Collaborative Approach to Domain-Driven Design
Domain-Driven Design (DDD) has transformed how we build software by ensuring our technical implementations reflect the nuances of business domains. Yet while...
The 1% Canary: Minimising Risk in Progressive Delivery
Progressive delivery has become a cornerstone of modern software deployment, but traditional canary releases often involve too much risk too quickly. Enter t...
Mastering Prompt Engineering: The New Essential Skill
Prompt engineering has rapidly evolved from an obscure technique to a critical skill in the AI ecosystem. It represents the art and science of crafting input...
Navigating the Landscape of Domain-Specific Language Models: Beyond General-Purpose AI
The evolution of domain-specific language models represents one of the most promising developments in practical AI deployment. While general-purpose models l...
Enhancing API Adoption
One of the significant challenges in the development of APIs is capturing and conveying their business value effectively.
AI-aided test-first development
There’s a growing interest in leveraging AI tools to aid in code development in the software industry. While many opt to use models like ChatGPT to generate ...
Why Developers Shun ChatGPT Discussions
The emergence of OpenAI’s GPT models, including ChatGPT, has revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and opened up new possibilities fo...
Event Sourcing
As a software developer, I have a strong opinion on Event Sourcing as a software design pattern and architectural style. Event Sourcing is a unique and innov...
Automated Code Reviews
Automated code review tools are a game changer for software development. By integrating these tools into the merge request process, developers can receive re...
Sealed Secrets
Kubernetes uses a key-value object called a secret, but by default, they are not fully secure. They are kept separate from other data to allow for separate s...
SBOMs
In May 2021, the U.S. White House issued its Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and it has the potential to revolutionize software devel...
Repurposing the Operator
The use of the Kubernetes Operator pattern for purposes other than managing applications deployed on a cluster can be seen as a useful solution:
BDD in the Cloud
``` Scenario: User can scale a cloud native application horizontally
Conways Law
Conway’s Law serves as a reminder that effective communication structures are essential to successful software development. The structure of a team can enabl...
Github Actions
GitHub Actions are automated tasks that can be triggered directly from a GitHub repository. They are used to automate software development workflows such as ...
I Love NATS!
Nats.io is an open-source, cloud-native messaging system that provides high-performance and secure communication between services and applications. It uses t...
Challenges with Gitops
I suggest approaching GitOps with caution, particularly when it comes to branching strategies. GitOps can be a great way to implement infrastructure as code,...
Distroless Images
Distroless Docker images are becoming popular for deployment containers due to their small size and reduced attack surface. These images eliminate the full o...
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
What Is IaC?
kOps
kubectl for clusters.
Terraform configuration for provisioning a trivial AWS ECS example
I’ve started documenting how terraform works with AWS, with a view to sharing with work colleagues that are unfamiliar with terraform and/or AWS resources.
KDE, not a desktop environment
When working with Kubernetes, it is convenient to spin up a local cluster for development purposes. There are a variety of solutions for doing this: Minikube...
Mono or Multi, who cares
All configuration management that I do is using git. git is both fast and efficient. Different projects that I work on use either a mono-repo approach or a m...
Bootstrapping OSX
To make (re)-initialising a mac easier I’ve scripted a setup bashed on homebrew.
Git - multiple personalities
Using git in both work and home, being able to configure the environment efficiently depending on what I’m doing is critical.
Quarkus - Supersonic Subatomic Java
Using Java in a Microservice based Architecture is challenging. The JVM is slow to start and consume significant memory at bootstrap. In container based de...
Doc generation - docusaurus
I’ve been learning a new product in work, as I go along I’ve kept notes on various features / functionality. Over time this has grown into a useful document...
Cookie Cutting - Go project initialisation
Recently I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time setting up project infrastructure for Go based projects. Looking at options around how I could t...
USB Bootable CentOS with custom Kickstart
Re-imaging servers for testing purposes is a laborious activity. Anything that can speed this up is a godsend. In a networked environment using a tftp and ...
Micro ONOS
µONOS is a code-name for the next generation architecture of ONOS - an open-source SDN control and configuration platform. The µONOS architecture is:
Load testing NETCONF servers
Gotling is a great HTTP Load test tool. Nothing exists for doing something similar over NETCONF. nc-hammer is a tool that can be used to generate load agai...
net/netconf - Golang NETCONF Library
Mature NETCONF client libraries exist for Python. For Go, the primary library is hosted at https://github.com/Juniper/go-netconf. Although hosted under the...
Kotlin
I bumped into an old work-colleague, someone who I respect as a great programmer, a JVM nut, and he’s raving about Kotlin and type inference.
I love uncle bob
Anyone that has worked with me for any period of time, knows I love Bob. Bob released a new book last year, only got time recently to work through it. If you...
Micro Frontends
The idea behind Micro Frontends is to think about a website or web app as a composition of features which are owned by independent teams. Each team has a dis...