So. What is TSD? It’s a small library whose purpose is to make it easy to collect, render, compare, diff, and test tree-shaped data. Once we get past basic programming, it is very common to have to create orchestras of objects that form conceptual trees. Note, these aren’t literal trees. Hmmm. Better talk about that. […]
UDispatch #5: What is TSD? Read More »
So. Hanna Thomas wrote an excellent article a few days back, here. When Lean-Agile methodologies are brought up in progressive spaces, they’re often met with a suspicious side-eye. After all, as Audre Lorde said, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the… The article was briefly suppressed, but it was restored pretty quickly, and there it
Agility, Feminism, and Collaboration Read More »
I’d like to take a second to address a trope I see here and there about the founding of the agile community. It’s the stuff about "old white men". Non-trigger warning: relax. This isn’t a rant. BTW, I hate using the word "agile" for our movement, & usually use circumlocutions to avoid it. I believe
Old White Guys and Agility Read More »
Refactoring Pro-Tip: When I make tacit relationships explicit I nearly always improve my code. Once I move past syntactical refactorings into semantics, this is often my first set of moves. So what does this mean, "tacit" vs "explicit", in code? Maybe the easiest way to come at it is with a very dumb example. The
TDD Pro-Tip: Make The Tacit Explicit Read More »
The next amazing layer, now that we’ll have plugin architectures worked out, is to use plugins as stand-ins — very lightweight simulators — of the upstream behavior. A "stand-in" is a plugin that pretends to be an upstream service expressly for the purpose of developing a particualr downstream or set of downstreams that operate against
UDispatch #4: Stand-In Plugins Read More »
Generic traffic display is part of the second layer of UDispatch’s intended functionality. And that’s okay. But custom traffic display is even better. The first layer gives us the handy bulk reverse proxy, and the second one gives us generic traffic display. And both of these help a little. But there’s two more layers of
UDispatch #3: Custom Traffic Display Read More »
Thick culture begins with developing a sense of temporality: past, present, and future. I believe that if we persist without this sense, the geek trades will never be other than the dystopia we experience today. (This conversation is a hard one. Expect a rambler of a muse, here.) Start with plain ol’ professional programming. If
Thick Culture Begins With Temporality Read More »
Half of the point of upstream-centric architectures is simultaneous change, and that means the content needs versioning & diagnostics, not just our transport. The biggest single difference between a modern upstream-centric architecture and our database apps: the database app doesn’t change without our control. We choose how/when we upgrade. In effect, the database, even though
Upstream Uptime #4: Content-Level Versioning and Diagnostics Read More »
The first layer is the handy UI-capable bulk reverse-proxy, and the next thing we layer on to it is generic traffic inspection. (I should so not be writing this up right now. I got other fish to fry. But there are some blockers I’m waiting on, and I have a little time, and I just
UDispatch #2: The Second Layer Read More »
UDispatch has multiple layers of functionality in it. The first thing it is: a reverse proxy on the dev box that knows your upstreams and knows they’re sets. When you’re coding in a downstream, you typically have multiple upstreams you’re developing against. Service#1, Service#2, and so on. Your code sends HTTP to those services, they
UDispatch #1: Start With a Bulk Reverse Proxy Read More »
