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books

Book Review: Release It!

Michael T. Nygard’s Release It! was referred to several times at MuCon and keeps coming up when people discuss microservices. Despite being released in 2007 the book feels up-to-date. There was a lot of useful advice in here and, even when material was familiar, it was still entertaining. I wish I’d read this years ago – it  would have saved a few mistakes.

The book is a good mix of instruction and case studies. Seeing how Nygard coped with real-life outages is both instructive and fascinating. The advice ranges from high-level (an excellent overview of networking) to low-level (when doing load tests, make sure some connections don’t log out).

Some of the sections I found particularly useful were the one on third party SLA’s and how to deal with them; QA vs production (one of those issues that keeps returning for me); the need to consider data purging from the start of a platform. There is also the discussion of the circuit breaker pattern, which seems to have been one of the most influential parts of the book.

As my responsibility has increased, I’ve needed to think more about the terrible things that might happen to a system. A lot of junior developers are perhaps too optimistic and books like this one are good for giving an idea of how subtly brittle systems can be and the need to develop a certain cynicism. For example, in a section on testing, Nygaard writes:

“A good test harness should be devious. It should be as nasty and vicious as real-world systems will be. The test harness should leave scars on the system under test. Its job is to make the system under test cynical”

Parts of Release It! feel like a horror novel for software developers. It will open your eyes to places where your software is vulnerable and how bad things might get. The book is also funny – laugh out loud funny in a few places. The best endorsement I can give is that this is one of those books you want to force everyone around you to read.

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brightonjava

Brighton Java – Agile Testing and Spring

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We had a packed session at Brighton Java last Wednesday, with Kim Knup from Crunch starting by discussing Agile Testing. The testing community is absolutely incredible and they’ve done so much to define their role within software development, moving it away from the unsophisticated idea of simply catching bugs.

The second talk was Luke Whiting on Micro services, micro effort. The slides and source code are now online.  I’m looking forward to playing with the tools that Brandwatch have been working with in this area.

The next Brighton Java meeting is on March 4th, with speakers to be announced nearer the time.  I don’t know who it is yet, as I’m not organising this one. I’m looking forward to being able to relax a little more on the night.

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brightonjava

2015 – Brighton Java

Weblogs are generally quietest when there are a lot of things going on in the writer’s life. I have notes on several posts but haven’t finished any yet. I’ve been researching a lot of topics such as RabbitMQ and Docker, thinking about microservices and handed in my notice at Crunch. There’s certainly a lot to talk about.

I also need to write up some notes on my talk at Brighton Java in January. For various reasons (some of them out of my control) the talk was less successful than I’d hoped, but I think there were some useful points in there.

The February Brighton Java event is on the 4th, and there are only a few spots left. Kim Knup is talking about Agile Testing and Luke Whiting is returning to talk about developing services in Spring. I also need to find speakers for the March event.