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...

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: Cover basics and explore new tricks of Test Driven Development (TDD) in Java Create new code &...

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...

Introduction Amazon just announced general availability of their Elastic Container Service providing a platform for launching Docker images in the cloud.  Let’s say your team is developing software on Windows and Mac OSX, but Docker requires the Linux kernel’s virtualization features to work. By now, you have likely discovered that Vagrant and/or...

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...

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...

Getting Started Let’s start with the 800lb gorilla in the room, Java. Why Java? Well, let’s start off with the fact that it’s got a ton of community support and documentation everywhere. If you Google a programming problem, chances are within the first three results you will see an example...

One of the tenets of the agile methodology is feedback. To provide value to your customer, you need to know that what you are delivering is correct. But as an agile coach, I often struggle with teams understanding the importance of getting feedback from the customer as soon as possible....