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Blog
Implementing Pagination and Tagging with Jekyll
I previously gave you a guided tour of all the recent changes to the blog. I moved the full list of posts from the home page into a separate paginated Posts area and organized them into Topics. But how was it implemented?
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Organizational Anti-Patterns
Organizational Anti-Patterns #5: The Future Platform
Let’s say you work for a large organization that, for whatever reason, has a lot of duplicate development. Pick any kind of project you can think of and, if you look hard enough, you’ll find five different teams working on their own version. Almost inevitably, a VP will decide that the solution to this recurring problem is to build The Future Platform.
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Blog
Posts and Topics
I’ve had a fun few days messing around with the blog. The trigger was some feedback from a first time visitor. They found the long, seemingly endlessly scrolling, list of posts intimidating and hard to navigate. I’d always planned to add more structure to the blog but that’s hard to do without a reasonable amount of content to seed it with. Clearly, I now had enough posts to test out whatever navigation scheme I came up with.
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Spreadsheets
The World's Most Boring Spreadsheet
What’s the best way to get started with a big new project? Something like building an open source, serverless, customer deployed, scalable spreadsheet from scratch?
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AWS
Free or Not?
Last month I dived into AWS cost models and used that to decide whether AWS services are Serverless or Not. As I get closer to actually trying to implement my open source, serverless, customer deployed, scalable spreadsheet I’ve found myself wondering about the AWS free tier.
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Organizational Anti-Patterns
Organizational Anti-Patterns #4: Throwing it over the wall
Throwing it over the wall is a common business idiom for “passing a project or problem to another person without consulting with them or coordinating the transfer”. It’s commonly considered to be a bad thing.
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Spreadsheets
Cloud Architecture
Spreadsheets are the Future of Data Systems
The final chapter of Martin Kleppmann’s wonderful book Designing Data-Intensive Applications is called “The Future of Data Systems”. In this chapter he talks about data integration between different specialized systems using flows of derivative data, unbundling today’s complex databases into simpler specialized data storage components and composing them with dataflow processing systems. At one point, almost as a throw away remark, he mentions that spreadsheets already have most of the dataflow programming capabilities that such a system would need. Of course, a spreadsheet is just a spreadsheet. A real data system needs to be durable, scalable and fault tolerant. It needs to integrate with a wide variety of disparate technologies.
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Navisworks
Autodesk
Spreadsheets
Tools vs Solutions
James Awe is the first Software Architect I met at Autodesk. He was involved in the acquisition process for Navisworks, where I was then CTO. Some years later he shared the story of how he first became aware of Navisworks.
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Organizational Anti-Patterns
Autodesk
Organizational Anti-Patterns #3: Exceptions
There’s a VP move under way. A company wide mandate has been issued. Big changes are coming. What’s your immediate reaction? Are you excited? Ready for the challenge? Or is your first thought to wonder how you can get an exception?
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AWS
AWS re:Invent 2022
I’ve only attended re:Invent in person once. I quickly realized that apart from the mountain of swag you get to bring home, there’s very little advantage to being there in person. It’s in Vegas. There are more than fifty thousand attendees. Do I need to say more?