Blog Insights

I've been pairing for over a decade. I've witnessed and tried all kinds of things shoulder-to-shoulder with all kinds of pairing partners. Through the years I've witnessed a single consistent misfire while pairing. We don't understand our roles. As professional problem solvers we gravitate towards actively solving the problem at hand. Similarly, my...

In a previous post, I mentioned that in order to have a successful DevOps experience, there were some key components and principles that need to be implemented. In this post, I'll cover those components in more detail....

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...

What I want to cover in this post is the experience that I had transitioning from a traditional development role to DevOps and what I learned to be useful in that transition. One of the nice things that I experienced with DevOps was that it pushes developers to take more ownership of their...

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...

About a month ago, I facilitated the first event as part of the Source Allies external mentoring program known as Source Allies University (SAU). It was an interactive forum and networking event designed to: I want to thank my employer, Source Allies, for offering the workshop, and Kaplan University for graciously hosting the...

Source Allies is a technical consultancy proudly working with partners in Des Moines. We focus on application development, and trend towards newer technologies. Our strength lies in our people: talented, intelligent, and able to handle challenges in a professional manner. Our hope has always been to have a positive impact...

But with so many different options available to configure how your Docker containers talk to each other, how do you get started?  In this article, we will take a look at a basic set of containers needed to stand up your own Docker registry (a must if you want to share your...

Your hard drive with very important family pictures has just failed, and now all data is lost forever. Could you have prevented this from happening? This article is a quick walk though of how to detect hard drive errors before the disk is unusable. At the end of this article, you...