Random posts about tech
Sitting in a SCRUM meeting, I hear my pet peeve. “I just have to …” someone says. My internal alarm bells go off – NO! I have heard this refrain many times. It rarely ends well. “Just” is a word we use to trick ourselves that our environment is not complicated. Yes, the concept of the change is simple. The core logic that needs to change is not cimplicated. However the implementation rarel...
I recently had a PV solar + Franklin Whole Home battery system installed. Electrically I have no complaints, working fine. However the battery connects to my WiFi, and I have complaints. While none of these are deal-breakers, they definitely qualify as something of which I expect better for a not-inexpensive utility-certified profesionally-installed system. The nexus of the system is the Fr...
DNS makes for a deceptively easy service-discovery platform. Various platforms (such as Docker swarm, Amazon Auto-Naming purport to provide a trivial to use service discovery mechanism. DNS is handled in most applications, so has the allure of working with legacy applications with zero integration work. Contrast DNS with purpose-built service discovery mechanisms such as Consul, Zookeeper, and...
My house has a bevy of Z-Wave devices, plus a few LiFX bulbs. This has allowed for some fairly fun automations: When the garage door opens, a tilt sensor attached to the door turns the external bulbs on to bright-white, and activates the garage internal lights. The outside lights revert to normal ‘dim 2700K’ after 3 minutes, and the garage lights goes off after about 10 minutes. ...
Jenkins is the juggernaut of the build pipeline ecosystem. Its roots go back to bespoke local build pipelines and dedicated build engineers. In present days the likes of CircleCI, CodeShip, Drone.io have started nipping at Jenkins heels. One of the significant differences is that, historically, Jenkins builds are configured inside Jenkins. The contemporary alternatives generally favor a SCM-...