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The secret history of Ctrl+Alt+Del
The background to why the famous “three finger salute” was chosen to be so difficult to do.
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Scala + Sbt + Docker quickly
I am currently starting to learn Scala (to add to a myriad of other languages I have programmed in over my career). We are also in the process of “dockerizing” our application. So I wanted to try for myself getting a simple Scala application running in Docker.
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Abandoning the baggage of Agile
I have worked with various flavours of “Agile” over numerous years. These have ranged from the very formal where everything is done by the book to more ad-hoc versions where different parts are cherry picked or in most cases done because people think they should be done.
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Abolish performance reviews
I have never been a fan of performance reviews. It may have been down to the way they were implemented at the places I worked however they never seemed to achieve what they were set out to do. The review would usually consist of going over the “achievements” for the past period and then setting a bunch of artificial goals for the next period. The only time these new goals were actually consulted was in the run up to the next review.
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Travel the world with the geographic game - GeoGuessr
This is a very simple idea for a quiz. It drops you in a random place somewhere in the world and you use Google StreetView to work out where it is. If you are lucky you end up in a town or city, sometimes you end up in the middle of nowhere. It is amazing how much you can work out by looking at the flora or a random signpost.
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The legacy vulnerability of the Internet
This article documents developments over the last ten years at all layers of the network stack. It also highlights how vulnerable the current Internet is.
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A simple change can lead to a big Impact
A simple change in message can lead to a big impact.
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In a distributed system ... there is no now
This paper is a discussion around the issues faced by distributed systems when dealing with time, ordering and failures. This is particularly relevant with the work I am doing at the moment designing a very large distributed system that will need to scale massively.
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A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Consensus Algorithms
This is a summary of a number of consensus algorithms currently being used in the Blockchain space. The most common at the moment is Proof of Work however this is slowly being replaced by other approaches that are more performant and don’t use all the Earth’s energy.
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REST API Guidelines
This is here for future reference - a very good set of guidelines for REST APIs.
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