Antony Denyer

With the emergence of FaaS entering the mainstream, we are starting to see some real world business value in using such an architecture. Many of the benefits of using FaaS are discussed elsewhere: [Read More]

The trend of re-inventing the wheel is on the rise. As new developers enter the industry, there appears to be a tendency to prefer the novel over the stable. I’ve seen developers favour one library over another simply by the number of commits or by how active it is. While I understand the desire to use libraries that are ‘actively’ maintained I do not understand the desire to use a library that is constantly changing. I would expect most developers would want their code to change more quickly than the libraries they are dependent upon. It struck me; they’re not in search of solutions or a way to add value, they’re in search of novelty. [Read More]

One of the frustrations of working with elasticsearch is not being able to make changes to your mappings and indexes without being destructive. You’d never use elasticsearch as your source of truth, so this isn’t normally a huge problem. But it can become a bit of a headache. The general advice tends to be ‘make your changes and then re-index everything again.’ Done wrong this can mean your search has no results while you re-index your data. [Read More]

Here is a collection of tips for using AWS lambdas. These tips are based on our experiences of using lambdas to ingest a legacy database into a new elasticsearch cluster. [Read More]

There seems to be two main schools of thought with regards to feature branches. Some argue that feature branches are an abomination and should not be considered as ‘continuous’ integration let alone delivery. Whilst others suggest that feature branches are a way of allowing each developer to work without disturbing everyone else. [Read More]