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Using your values to choose
At the London Action Science Meetup in January we discussed the article Emotional Agility (HBR, Nov 2013), and in particular how to apply the four steps described in the article: recognize your patterns; label your thoughts and emotions; accept them; and act on your values The importance of using your values […]
Read MoreRollbackability in upgrading a MySQL cluster
Here I give a lightning talk on how we mitigated the risk of upgrading the version of MySQL used in one of TIM Group’s most important databases. Our approach to risk mitigation was Rollbackability. Rather than spend all our time ensuring that nothing would go wrong, we decided to plan […]
Read MoreHuman Error and Just Culture
Sidney Dekker’s Just Culture made me thankful I don’t work in an occupation with a high risk of impacting public safety (those described in the book include aviation, health-care, and policing). In our society we believe that practitioners should be accountable for their actions, that without legal consequences after a […]
Read MoreSoCraTes Germany
SoCraTes Germany 2015 has again been a conference full of superlatives — or should I say “unconference”, given that it consists mainly of a two-day Open Space? Whatever you call it, we had more participants (over 180), more proposed sessions (90 – 100 sessions per day), and more sponsors than […]
Read MoreJoda Time? You might be overusing DateTime
We generally prefer to use Joda-Time for our date and time representation. Its immutable objects fit our house style, and the plusHours, plusDays etc methods usually produce much more readable and maintainable code than the giant bag of static methods based on Date and Calendar that we had before. Throw […]
Read MoreTRUNCATE making replicated MySQL table inconsistent
Here at TIM Group we make use of MySQL’s statement-based replication. This means that some functions, like UUID and LOAD_FILE, cannot be used when we write code or do manual maintenance because they break the consistency of the slaves. We now know we have to add the TRUNCATE statement to […]
Read MoreFrom structure to behaviour – migrating to an Event Sourced system
For a few years now we have identified Event Sourcing as being a good fit for the sort of applications we build at TIM Group. This is becoming increasingly important as the business has been transitioning from an alpha capture and distribution tool to a platform that provides analytics as […]
Read MoreWorkflow for deploying potentially unstable Tucker components
When adding a Tucker component to an application, it’s important to get the workflow right so as to avoid contributing noise to our already noisy alerting. Now support for that workflow is built into Tucker, it’s easier to get right than ever before. Problem Occasionally, I’ve added a Tucker component […]
Read MoreMDI: Monitoring Driven Infrastructure?
Adam and I attended the London Infracoders Meetup last night which featured a demo of serverspec and Beaker. When I asked Adam what he thought he wasn’t impressed*. “I don’t see the point of this if you’re using Puppet unless you’re worried about typos or you don’t control your production […]
Read MoreSwitching To Scala talk @ Devoxx 2014
Last year I was lucky enough to be able to attend (and participate a little bit) at Devoxx UK. I found it to be a great conference, with a friendly vibe and interesting talks. This year I’m going back for seconds, as a speaker, talking about some of my experiences […]
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