A semi-serious approach to examining our work environments — Moana is a 2016 animated Disney film. It opens in Motunui, a semi-fictional Polynesian island and village. At the movie’s start, the people of Motunui are pretty much homebodies, as the chief has forbidden anyone from venturing beyond the island’s reef. …

If nothing else, please heed #2! — Medium is filled with articles that are, in turn, filled with important life lessons. Lessons that the author has learned over the years. Lessons that, when followed, promise to have a profoundly positive effect on the readers’ lives. I myself have learned a lot over years of experience. And one…

Hate your organization instead — If you’ve been an engineer at an appreciably-sized org, then you’ve certainly experienced this scenario: You belong to a team that owns some number of applications or services. Since your team designed and developed them, you know them inside and out. …

The answer is ”as soon as your entity is created“… but is it really that simple? — Awhile back, a colleague and I were discussing the technical design of an application that we were building. In this context, our rich client was generating a piece of data and posting it through a ReST API. This data represented a discrete entity; as such, it needed to be assigned…

How can you pass JVM arguments into a non-existent Run Configuration? — One of the great things about an IDE like Eclipse is how easy it is to run your application on the fly, as you’re developing it. Eclipse uses the concept of a Run Configuration for this. Run Configurations define your code’s entry point (i.e. …

LEGIBILITYMATTERSMORETHANGRAMMAR… or, rather, LegibilityMattersMoreThanGrammar — I like to be productive and efficient. So anything that unnecessarily wastes even a few moments of my time… well, it really bugs me. That is why I am particularly bugged by a particular practice (nay, an anti-practice) that I see too often. …

It’s all about the rhythm — Sometimes a vocal line in a rock or pop song hits you just so. In what might otherwise be a fairly standard tune — maybe even a cliché one —along comes a measure or two of singing that really stands out…. and for whatever reason, really pulls you in. Now…

And more importantly… why does it matter? — In many of the articles I’ve written — particularly those discussing microservice architectures — I’ve drawn a direct line between technical architectures and organizational structures. This idea, of course, has parallels with Conway’s famous Law. But in my discussions, I’ve tried to emphasize one specific point: If your engineering organization…

Aren’t they really just the same thing? — Domain Driven Design — or DDD — is a software design methodology popularized by Eric Evans. DDD focuses on domains; that is, subject areas within an organization, coupled with the experts of those subject areas. For those of us working with microservices, two particularly useful patterns have arisen out of…