In a recent Go programming task I needed to loop through the letters from a to z. I also needed the capital letter from A to Z. For-looping thorugh the letters in Go is luckily a breeze.
The easiest way is just using a Rune. A Rune is an int32 which represent a unicode character. As a rune (the variable r below) is a Unicode character, it allows me to use the ToUpper() from the unicode package to find the Uppercase version of the letter.
Github is quite a fantastic service for source code management and hosts a suite of wonderful tools which can help you manage the development, tracking issues and much more.
One of the fun things is the github activity dashboard located on your personal frontpage which shows how much you’ve done.
I’m sure it’s mostly a fun thing and it allows you to sort of get an idea of it the account is dead or alive. Some seem to have pride in having a green carpet showing long periods of continuous activity.
No, your servers should (probably) not have a facebook profile, nor should your servicebus have a twitter profile, but as the work tools change and evolve, you should probably consider updating the stream of status mails to more modern “social media” used at work.
When you’re in DevOps you probably get a steady stream of emails from various systems checking in. It may be alert emails, health checks or backup completed emails. It’s been more “fun” getting these mails with the rise of unlimited mail storage and powerful email-search tools should you ever need to find something in the endless stream of server-generated mails.
Remember the good old days, when IT got a new server. It was a special event - and naturally the naming game. Finding that special name for the server, which neatly fitted into the naming scheme adopted (be it Indian cities, Nordic mythology or cartoon characters).
This ought to be then, but the ceremony still happens regularly in many IT departments, where servers are treated with the same affection as with pets - and with all the bad side effects it may bring along.
I’m digging through a backlog of podcasts and the gem of the day goes to SE-Radio podcast. In episode #247 they talk about DevOps and while I’ve preached and practiced DevOps for years, as mainly as common sense, the podcast did present a more reasonable argument why it works.
Developers are praised and appreciated for short time to market; the number of new features they introduce and changes they make to the running system.
Most IT departments have the best intentions of providing the best quality, coherent solutions, yet market conditions, projects running in parallel and various constraints on budgets, resources or time, often causes what might be defined as Accidental Architecture.
The easiest way to identify cases where you’ve been hit by accidental architecture is when describing your it architecture and look for the works “except” or “but not”. Typical examples include - we have a single-sign system utilized everywhere except…”, “We update all systems to current versions, but not this old system…”.
It seems to be quite popular to move away from custom build IT solutions to so called COTS - commercial of the shelf solutions. The idea being, that to software solution fulfil a functionality which long has been commoditized and standardized to such an extent that it offers no “competitive edge” nor core value to the business.
For most companies and organizations the office suite would be a pretty safe bet for a piece of software which is magnificently suited for a COTS solution. Finding someone who develops an internal word processor in-house seems crazy as so many fully capable solutions exists in the market.
Here’s a little trick, which is has proven itself just as useful as it is easy. To most companies handling domains is critical task, as losing your domain name may have catastrophic consequences. Handling domains isn’t particularly hard, but there are some tasks, that may be time-critical to handle in due time - luckily Google Calendar provides an easy way to help make sure these tasks are handled.
(In this little tip, I’m using Google Calendar as the reference, but Outlook.com, Office365 or any other online calendaring system can probably do the same.)