RPC between Go and Ruby using Protocol Buffers
I’ve previously written some thoughts on service oriented architectures and since then I’ve wanted to explore beyond the currently accepted standard of sending and receiving JSON data over web APIs. Protocol Buffers With JSON there’s an overhead of transmitting plain-text over the wire coupled with parsing that text in your application once received. For many cases this is probably acceptable but for a large-scale distributed system this can represent a not insignificant cost in terms of bandwidth and computing resources.
Five years of contracting
April 1st saw me celebrate five years of working as an in independent contractor. This also means I’ve now spent two years in London and it’s been four years since I last worked in Northern Ireland. It’s scary how fast time flies. Changes and not My second contract here required the use of a limited company so it meant finally waving goodbye to the simplicities of being a sole trader. I’d originally set up NullTheory Ltd for my very first contract but was advised to go down the sole-trader route so it had been lying dormant for some time.
Docker and Go Hello World
One of the most bandied about buzzwords at the moment has got to be Docker. So many people I’ve spoken to claim to be moving their application environments to it and some even have it running in production with varying degrees of success. Fine in theory The theory of isolating groups of related processes into containers which then themselves can be further orchestrated to build out an environment is very appealing.
Blogging on Ansible
A good friend of mine recently voiced the opinion that the day will soon be upon us when the traditional SysAdmin will no longer be relevant and all operations activities will be some variety of DevOps. Now, I’ve been managing my own infrastructure for some years but every package has been manually installed with every configuration file modified by hand, resulting in snowflake servers which are nigh-on impossible to recreate exactly and have occasionally caused me a lack of sleep.
A simple service oriented architecture using Ruby and Go
Some common pain points seem to keep cropping up time and time again as applications grow in size and complexity: tests get longer to run deployments become a much more involved process making a small fix to one area of code can often break something in another it can be much harder to reason about the system as a whole These large, monolithic applications are affectionately known as monorails in the Rails world and the common wisdom is to start splitting up the codebase into services: to extract areas of functionality out into self-contained, independent applications which work in unison to deliver the original capability.
Serving up a static site using Go
Like a lot of people in technology a portion of my time is spent wondering what will be the next programming language, framework or whatever to take off and become popular. Of greater personal importance is the matter of which one of them will get added to my toolboox next and press-ganged into productive use. For years now Ruby has been my goto for a lot things and I’ve been doing more and more OS X and iOS development but it had been some time since I last picked up something new and I had a hankering for some shinyness.
Contracting in London
Since I last wrote about my experience working outside of Northern Ireland I’ve returned to the UK, turned down prospects of contract work in Belfast and have set up shop in London. Serendipity A good while back Rob and myself had discussed the possibility of London. He’d been working remotely with a company based here and due to changes in his circumstances leaving N. Ireland was a valid option. Lines of communication between the two of us dropped off for a while as a result of travel, work and such like and when I finally got caught up with him I discovered he’d already bitten the bullet and was moving over.
Decisions, decisions, decisions
I can be an awfully indecisive person at times. Often I’ve been in the grips of analysis paralysis unable to pick a course of action to take, crippled with choice. When I was a student I read The Dice Man and was sorely tempted to make all my decisions by rolling a die or tossing a coin. Needless to say this is maybe not the best way for a person to navigate through life.
Two years of working away from home
I’m currently sitting in Melbourne enjoying the Australian summer and a well deserved break from work. I can barely remember the northern hemisphere winter I left behind a few weeks ago. I’ve only briefly mentioned working away from home before but January past marked two years since I last worked in Belfast. The pace has been hectic at times and I’ve spent more nights in hotels than I care to recall but from my first contract in Dublin to my last in the south of England I’ve found a consistant theme: being treated with more respect, working on more interesting problems and for higher pay.
An Introduction to WebSockets
Last week I gave a short talk at BelfastJS outlining WebSockets: what they are, how you use them, examples, warnings and alternatives. That should cover the basics I think. A few months ago I spoke at BelfastRuby and it was good again to be sharing some knowledge with a bunch of people enthusiastic about technology and the local community. Hopefully we can keep things going and help make Belfast a supportive environment for those involved in the knowledge economy.