I am back on the learning Scala trail and it is clear that just reading books and articles or watching videos won't cut it. It needs to be hands-on coding.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A simple change in message can lead to a big impact.

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.