Blog Insights

Summary Most AWS microservice articles only show you the tip of the iceberg. We certainly can't blame the article authors. For starters, the SAM squirrel mascot is so darned cute! But more importantly, we all know that standing up a production web service involves far more considerations than you could ever cover...

Background For the last 20 years, I’ve had some sort of automated home system. Around a year ago I added Google Home and voice controlled automation. To do this, I used HA Bridge to emulate a Phillips Hue Hub to connect my X10 lights to the Google Home. Problem In February, Google released...

As I head back to school at Northwestern this fall, I am sure I will hear, “What did you do this summer?” 100 times. My response will be "Well, let me tell you about my experience as an apprentice at Source Allies." From day one, myself and four other apprentices were...

Build an API backend for your application using the newest version of .NET that can be developed anywhere and run everywhere. This tutorial walks through the process to build a production-ready service to perform CRUD operations on a "Pokemon." Download and Install the .NET Core SDK from https://www.microsoft.com/net/core. If you are...

class Car { numberOfWheels: number; color: string; } function describeCar(car : Car){ return "Number of Wheels: " + car.numberOfWheels + " Color: " + car.color; } var car = {numberOfWheels: 4, color: "Red"}; document.body.innerHTML = describeCar(car); That’s...

In a previous article we discussed some of the positive characteristics of microservices that we've found while implementing them in a production setting. Two of the primary benefits we discussed are the architectural agility and enforcement of api boundaries. While you may find those and many more benefits from using microservices, you will also find that the positives don't...

A recent topic grabbing the stage in the software community is the use of Microservice Architectures. Microservice architectures are often sold as a great way to enhance a project's agility over a standard, monolithic architecture. While this can certainly be the case, and there are indeed many benefits from using microservices, the...

Motivated by the introduction of Lambdas in Java 8, I wrote a couple of examples to see how difficult it would be to follow a functional programming paradigm in real production code. I will demonstrate using some features from Java 8 with a simple and fun example. The application basically gets the...

During my career, I've worked at various organizations that had different stances toward open source frameworks and tools. Some of these organizations absolutely did not want  anything open source near their code base. Others had a small set of "blessed" open source frameworks we were allowed to use. Some of...

Java is an object oriented (OO) language. It internally embraces the best practices commonly accepted in OO programming. During this article we will be addressing two of the key concepts of OOP, Encapsulation and Inheritance. So let’s get started. What is the core defining concept of any OO language? The creation...