Useful Links: The Practice of Practice

This is a very interesting talk on practicing for Operational events. The speaker draws parallels with musicians practicing for a performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87EhBrC2L1U

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Learning Forth

One of my side projects for this year is to learn the programming language, Forth. Some people might consider this an odd language to learn. It is not a popular language. There are no hot startups using it (that I know of). It doesn't even show up in the top 100 languages in the TIOBE Index . However, I am convinced learning it is worthwhile. Some of my reasons for this are: Forth is probably the most successful and widely deployed language that nobody has heard of. It is the language used to develop OpenFirmware . This boot loader is installed on the laptops of the One Laptop Per Child Project , on PowerPC based Apple Mac computers, and on SPARC based computers from SUN Microsystems. It has also been used to develop to develop control software for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory , which is where it was developed. While not as widely used as C/C++, Forth is used a lot in embedded applications and has been ported to most micro-controllers. For example, the Forth, Inc. w...

Repost: ANTLR Trinity

This post is a repost of an article I had on a previous incarnation of this blog. I hadn't intended to transfer it over, as the technology is old now (ANTLR is on version 4), but I recently came acros a slide deck online, where the post was referenced, so I am reposting in case anyone was looking for it. There are 3 components to a really useful software development technology: innovative features, clear and comprehensive documentation, and solid tools. The recent release of ANTLR v3.0 is a perfect example of this. This parser generator tool has all 3 components and each component is done superbly. ANTLR is a parser generator tool that is capable of targeting multiple output languages. Out of the box it will generate Java, Python, C, C#, or Ruby code for parsers. Other target languages are possible if the code generators are written. Amongst its cool features are: LL(*) parsing: This is an extension to the normal, top down with looka...

Useful Links: Going faster with continuous delivery

Just thought I would share a blog post on how Amazon does continuous deployment. The title of the article highlights a key goal: faster deployment of completed features. This is a key metric that identifies high performing teams, i.e., deployment latency. In her book, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, Nicole Fosgren identified this as one of four highly predictive metrics for high performing software teams. The section on risk management is especially worthwhile. The risk reduction strategies mentioned in the article can be implemented with AWS Code Pipeline and/or Kubernetes Deployments. https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/going-faster-with-continuous-delivery/

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