Microservices one of these ideas that are nice in practice, but all manner of complexity comes out when it meets reality. For this reason, I wanted to write this article to capture some of these and redress the balance.

The desire to solve every possible problem that might come up in some context leads to failure. Solve the problem at hand, nothing more. Start with the application at hand. Everything that's not needed to implement that application, down to the function-argument level, has to go. Sure, write the code so that you can extend it later, but don't put those extensions into it right off the bat.

Here’s part 1 of short animated video describing our engineering culture.

Strider is an Open Source Continuous Integration and Deployment platform. It is written in JavaScript/Node.JS and uses MongoDB. It is released under the BSD license. While similar conceptually to systems such as Travis and Jenkins, Strider is designed to be easy to setup, use, and customize.

Python, on the other hand, has problems of its own. The biggest is that it has dozens of web application frameworks, but none of them are any good. Pythonists are well aware of the first part but apparently not of the second, since when I tell them that I’m using my own library, the universal response is “I don’t think Python needs another web application framework”. Yes, Python needs fewer web application frameworks. But it also needs one that doesn’t suck.

I’m building a toy HTML rendering engine, and I think you should too. This is the first in a series of articles.

Detect the language of text.

Most modern processors are multi-core, yet Perl programs will typically run single-threaded on only one core at a time. Enter the Many Core Engine module - it makes it easy to run your existing Perl code in parallel across every core on your platform, and get a huge speed boost along the way.

We tend to see the web as a reactive model, where every action causes a reaction. Users click, then we take them to a new page. They click again, and we open another page. But we can do better. We can be proactive with prebrowsing.

An informed guide to misconceptions of Agile.

I recently came across a rather misinformed document called the Anti-Agile Manifesto. Normally, I just ignore this sort of thing, but in this case, people I know who are in the exploratory phase of agile adoption were treating the document seriously. Because the thinking in this document, which is not uncommon, undermines the success of fledgling agile shops, it seemed worth discussing it.