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Articles by Adron Hall
Setup Postgres, and GraphQL API With Hasura on Azure
I created a data model to store railroad systems, services, scheduled, time points, and related information, detailing the schema "Beyond CRUD n' Cruft Data-Modeling" with a few tweaks. The original I'd created for Apache Cassandra, and have since switched to Postgres giving the option of primary and foreign keys, relations, and the related connections for the model.
Language Stack Installation for Python & Go
Previously I've gone through the steps I take to get a solid development machine setup. From the base operating system load, to the browser and basic IDEs I install. Now I've got more videos and the respective notes and details about what two language stacks I setup next; Python and Go. Python In regards to the Python stack, this one can often be somewhat confusing. Depending on the operating system I setup the stack a little differently.
Creating a Go Module & Writing Tests in Less Than 3 Minutes
In this short (less than 4 minutes) video I put together a Go module library, then setup some first initial tests calling against functions in the module. NOTE: For each of these time points listed below, if you navigate to the video on YouTube, the time points are easier to naviagte to since YouTube creates clickable time points! 👍🏻 00:12 - Writing unit tests. 📝 00:24 - Create the first go file. 00:40 - Creating the Go go.mod file.
5 Ways to Learn & Improve Your Programming Language Use
Posted the question, What to write when starting to learn and programming language? I started an answer to the question in this video. But read on for more extensive list and details! I've written up this article. It started last week when I wrote up "Top 5 Ways to get the coding basics down!" This week I wanted to delve deeper into a specific item on that list and provide what I came up with, which is this List of 10 things to write in order to effectively learn a programming language. 1.
WTF is "Developer Focused"?
I always hear a lot about companies being developer focused. Maybe it's a bit of cynicism but I never expect much from this goal. Few companies have been effectively developer focused, they just dream of it. I asked myself recently, and would love others' feedback. What exactly does it even mean to be developer focused?
Does the Cloud Kill Open Source? [Video]
Save {{ articles[0].views | formatCount}} Views Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Join For Free I had a great time at the last Seattle Scalability Meetup. I’ve also just finished processing and fixing up the video from this last Seattle Scalability Meetup. I feel like I’ve finally gotten the process of streaming and getting things put together post-stream so that I can make them available almost immediately afterward.
Refining the Definition of Developer Relations
Teaching is a big part of what we do in Developer Relations. Over the last few months, a lot of conversations have come up in regards to DevRel being under the marketing department within an organizational structure. Which has (of course) made me revisit the question: “What is DevRel, and what do we actually do again?” Let's review. Developer Advocates At the core of DevRel, somewhere, is the notion of advocacy to the developer.
Re-Installation of Linux, The Fuckery of Windows 10, and Microsoft Licensing
Notice: TLDR is at the very bottom. Notice: This post may damage sensitive ears. At points, it may be vulgar. Notice: If you want to get to just the Linux parts, scroll down to the "Patience and Linux Saves The Day" headline. The Beginning of Horror First, a few positives for Windows 10. It runs a Bash system thingy on it now, so that's pretty cool. It loads much faster than Windows 7 (and Vista). It still plays and supports basically all the games first.
4 Discovered Axioms of #DevRel
The idea of DevRel, or developer relations, and the position of developer advocates in the industry have become more defined in the last decade than they ever have been. In getting to this era, several key points have arisen that are now practically axioms. Some people don't agree with all of these (and I'd infer that they're probably just wrong).
How to Become a Data Scientist in 6 Months: A Hacker's Approach to Career Planning [Video]
I've been digging around for some good presentations, giving a listen to some videos from PyData London 2016. Out of the videos I watched, I chose this talk by Tetiana Ivanova. This is a good talk for those looking to get into working as a data scientist. Here's a few notes I made while watching the video. Why did Tetiana hack her career? Well, first off, she was a mathematician, and she wanted to get out of the world of academia and make a change.
7 Tips for Creating Technical Content on ''The Open Source Show'' [Video]
In this video with the rad Christina Warren, cloud developer advocate for Microsoft, we walk through about seven tips for creating technical content in a kind of rapid-fire back-and-forth of ideas. Recording this was great, as the way we did it presented us with a chance to put these ideas together like this.
Bash aka The Solution for Everything — The ''Special Files'' - DZone DevOps
In bash, the shell reads one or more startup files. Here's the details about what's what and which is run when. /etc/profile is executed automatically at login. The file from the list of ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, or ~/.profile are then executed at login. ~/.bashrc is executed by every non-login shell, but if sh is used to invoke bash it reads the $ENV for POSIX compatability. For reference, the ~ symbol is used in place of the user directory.
Evangelism, Advocacy, and Activism in the Technology Industry
Usually, I just head to my local office in downtown Ballard, a neighborhood in Seattle that was and still is largely its own city. Today, however, I've boarded the 17x Express Bus into downtown Seattle. While in transit, as I always do, I just sat back introspecting on the day to be and the days of past while reading Jeff's post "From Evangelist to Developer Advocates" on our occupation title changes.
AWS CLI Issues and Fixes for Installation [Code Snippet]
I sat down again, for about the eight billionth time, to install AWS's CLI and get to work against some infrastructure. For at least the gazillionth time, I got a stupid error, that at this point I really feel the installation process ought to ignore, mitigate, or otherwise handle. But anyway, here's one very common issue that keeps popping up over and over if you've got six installed already that isn't the version that wants (or doesn't want).
Terraform Changes, Provisioners, Connections, and Static Nodes [Video]
Note: The video is toward the bottom of the post with the timeline so you can navigate to certain points of the video where I speak to different topics. First, I start out this session with a simple issue I ran into the previous night. The fact that a variable in the name of the instance resource being created causes the instance to be destroyed and created on every single execution of Terraform.
Consistent Hashing
I wrote about consistent hashing in 2013 when I worked at Basho, when I had started a series called “Learning About Distributed Databases” and today, I’m kicking that back off after a few years (ok, after 5 or so years!) with this post on consistent hashing. As with Riak, which I wrote about in 2013, Cassandra remains one of the core active distributed database projects alive today that provides an effective and reliable consistent hash ring for the clustered distributed database system.
A Go Repo and Some Go Code [Video]
Wrapped up another Twitch stream (follow here) and streamed live via YouTube where the video is now (subscribe here, video here). However, the more interesting part, in my opinion, was where I broke down a few key parts of the application building features around file writes, reads, JSON marshaling, and some other functionality. I also put together a repo of the code I used here on Github (code shown and explained below).
The Nuances of Go: Go Program Structure
Beyond these 25 keywords, there are also some predeclared names that can be, but usually shouldn't be, used for naming. These include: First off, let's talk about the reserved words in Go. The list includes 25 keywords that can't be used as variables or names of functions or anything like that. This list includes: In my endeavor to get more of the specifics of Go figured out, I've been diving a bit more in depth into each of the specific features, capabilities, and characteristics of the language.
Thrashing Code Sessions, Week 34 [Video]
In this session, I talk through the issues I had in a previous session (but I give context, so there's no need to review it) with the environment variable problems I was having. I detail how Jetbrains Rider deals with environment variables for the user session, specifically versus how those are dealt with if you're using something like Visual Studio Code and its built-in terminal. After that, I move on to doing some refactoring and moving toward some feature additions.
Build a Kubernetes Cluster on GCP With Terraform
UPDATE: Many of the images have failed to load, but check out the original post to see all the images. Thanks! In this blog entry (original post), I’m going to detail a configuration with Terraform and cover, in some additional detail, the collateral resources you can expect to find once the configuration is executed. For the repository of this write-up, I created our_new_world available on Github.
How to Code With DSE6 + .NET
First steps. Let's get .NET installed and setup. I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 for this setup. To install .NET on Ubuntu one needs to go through a multi-command process of keys and some other stuff, fortunately Microsoft's teams have made this almost easy by providing the commands for the various Linux distributions here. The commands I ran are as follows to get all this initial setup done. After all this I could then install the .NET SDK.
Distributed Systems: Cassandra, DataStax, a Short SITREP
Apache Cassandra is one of the most popular databases in use today. It has many characteristics and distinctive architectural details. In this post, I'll provide a description and some details for a number of these features and characteristics, divided as such. Then, after that (i.e. toward the end, so skip there if you just want to know the differences) I'm doing to summarize key differences with the latest release of the DataStax Enterprise 6 version of the database.
Setting Up a Dev Machine for Node.js
It seems every few months setup of whatever tech stack is always tweaked a bit. This is a collection of information I used to setup my box recently. First off, for the development box, I always use nvm as it is routine to need a different version of Node.js installed for various repositories and such. The best article I've found that is super up to date for Ubuntu 18.04 is Digital Ocean's article (kind of typical for them to have the best article, as their blog is exceptionally good).
Cassandra/DataStax Enterprise 6 Clusters: Marketplace Options
As I have stepped full speed into work and research at DataStax, there were a few things I needed as soon as I could possibly get them and put them together. Before even diving into development, use case examples, or reference application development, I needed to have some clusters built up. The Docker image is great for some simple local development, but beyond that, I wanted to have some live 3+ node clusters to work with.
How Long do You Code Per Coding Session?
I was working on getting the latest DataStax Enterprise 6 up and running via the Docker Image offerings today and I stumbled across a site called hashnode.com. On that site was a harmless little question, but something I realized I ponder a lot, and even find myself in conversation about on a regular basis. The question is posed, "How many minutes/hours do you really sit to write code at a particular moment? I'm not saying the total summation of hours you code a day.
Let's Really Discuss Lock-In
For too long, lock-in has been referred to with an almost entirely negative connotation even though it can be inferred in positive and negative situations. The fact is that there's a much more nuanced and balanced range to benefits and disadvantages of lock-in. Often this may even be referred to as this or that dependency, but either way a dependency often is just another form of lock in.
Gaining a Systemic View of Immutable Infrastructure Tooling
I put together a few starter notes on things you should delve into and understand before working with infrastructure related tooling, like Ansible, Terraform, or similar tools. If you think I've missed any do ping me @Adron and let me know your thoughts on other additions. The first starter items I'd list as the following. With those basics covered, here are some of the things that help shape one getting a good understanding of what Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and related tooling is.
Adron's Thrashing Code
In the first part of this series I kicked off writing about how we created a manifesto at Home Depot. This is something I’d strongly urge anybody that is helping to lead an enterprise toward open source efforts. The second part focused on tactical tools used with open source software development. I’ll be adding more to the tools conversation a bit later in this series. Then in part three I delved into some of the positive cultural characteristics of a team working on open source projects.
.NET Fringe 2016, the OSS event you don't want to miss
In this video I had the privilege of talking to Glenn Block, Troy Howard and Adron Hall about the upcoming .NET Fringe event in Portland. They discussed the spirit of the event, why it is different, why you should be there, and how it will be run.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry Supports Docker Images, Not the Docker Ecosystem
When a word processor is capable of opening a file in another word processor’s format, we don’t say the first word processor supports the second one. That’s a very similar distinction to the one Pivotal is now drawing, in announcing that Pivotal Cloud Foundry now works with the Docker container image format.
A Brief Look at Immutable Infrastructure and Why it is Such a Quest
You’ve probably heard a thing or three about immutable infrastructure. It’s all the rage, and honestly it should be. It’s changing the paradigm in which software is shipped, built, and managed in a dramatic way. But what exactly is immutable infrastructure? Let’s talk about that for a minute, as with anything that gets popular, there are some core ideas behind it and some that are a bit more superfluous. Immutable simply means something that is created and left unchanged.
The Secrets of Measuring Developer Productivity
The Secrets of Measuring Developer Productivity By Adron Hall In this post I’m going to dive into one of the most tumultuous topics in software development. Measuring developer productivity is often seen as a fool’s errand, but more and more development teams are beginning to see its value. The hard part, however, comes when moving beyond the concept into setting a particular metric for developer productivity.
The Secrets of Measuring Developer Productivity
The Secrets of Measuring Developer Productivity By Adron Hall In this post I’m going to dive into one of the most tumultuous topics in software development. Measuring developer productivity is often seen as a fool’s errand, but more and more development teams are beginning to see its value. The hard part, however, comes when moving beyond the concept into setting a particular metric for developer productivity.
Mozilla's Rust 1.0 Alpha Release Comes With Hopes of Replacing C++
The alpha release of Rust 1.0 serves as a big day for the Mozilla supported systems programming language. It’s not the final 1.0 release but it is a next step for the stability of the programming language, which has been developed for safety and speed. All features are in place with no major breaking changes expected. The core libraries are feature-compliant. According to the Hacker News thread, it means, for example, that Rust will now be on a six week release cycle.
The Task of Measuring Developer Productivity
Measuring developer productivity is a daunting task. There is no better occupation than that of engineers and developers to game a system that is in essence a game to begin with. Set a metric, make it fair, make it reasonable and at some point it will become a game. The real question is, “are we moving steadily, reliably and responsibly toward our goal with the mission of the company in mind?” Can that even be measured? Is it even reasonable at a tactical level to measure these things?
Welcome to the Future, Your PaaS has Arrived
What is this Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) future exactly? How do NoOps and DevOps fit into this whole equation? PaaS is about making developers lives easier. PaaS is really a combination of things, focused around faster deployment times, lower barriers to entry, higher scalability, high availability, geographically dispersed systems, and more. So how do you get your PaaS ready to go? First there are a few key concepts to understand, so we'll dive into those first.
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