Tag Archives: technology

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May 4, 2014

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Change, Technology

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The Magic Factory

magic.factory

I recently discussed the “Magic Factory” with my girlfriend to see what she thought about a Grand ReOpening.  Oh, what is the Magic Factory? It’s a place I walk into mentally with one, or two, maybe three ideas and blue sky what might happen if I built applications around those ideas.

I’ve had a bunch of ideas up on AgileZen waiting to be unpacked and built but just lost the fire last year about this time to pick up my tools and start writing software again until this conversation happened.  But after trying all last year to relight the fire, all I could render was a spark and that was about it.

Then last month our shop announced Hack Day 2014 – hmm… how could I pass that up, right?  Our shop is going to give us 24 hours to build something from scratch then present to leadership the next day.  The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes were pretty sweet, but it wasn’t about winning for me – it was a test to see if I could start and finish – something you take for granted when you a bit less gray over the ears.  So, freakin’ sign me up!

I found a great (and smart) peer on my team who wanted to help build something in 24 hours from scratch.  I thought this would be the real test to see if I could pry the doors open on this place I used to spend so much time in.

We didn’t win the grand prize, or make the final cut – but we built an app in 24 hours that conveyed the business idea we wanted to promote.  So, now with the doors to the magic factory swinging with activity and visitors like my grandma’s front porch screen door, things feel a bit more normal now that this place is open.  Oh, by the way, welcome to my “Grand (Re)Opening!”

 

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May 4, 2014

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Technology

Mobile First. Cloud First.

TitanFall

A few weeks ago I listened to Scott Guthrie discuss mobility and how they relate to Azure, and vice versa.  I knew a bit about the mobile pieces, but the Azure side of the talk was pretty jammed up with new/updated services and offerings from Azure.  This platform has really come a long way in the last fours years for sure.

One of his first Azure talking-points was about IaaS and what it could mean to developers.  Enter TitanFall.

He discussed some of the elastic infrastructure the development and program folks were using to prop this game up – all over the world.  It was a pretty amazing aspect.  From this part of the talk we heard the quotes “Deploy at the Speed of Light – on your terms” and “Compete in a global market, but close to your customers”, “constantly available resources”.

All of those Azure or not, have a very nice ring to them – and true from what we saw in the TitanFall highlights.  So from what I can tell from the TitanFall preview, the size of your application isn’t as large of a problem like it has been in the past; IMHO the understanding of the architecture needs to really matter – how do all of the Legos fit together and if they talk to each other at all – who talks to who, when, and why.  That statement holds water in a lot of scenarios, today and yesterday however I think it fits in with future goals we set for our solutions today.

TitanFall has a lot of “headroom” to grow into, and the development tools are pretty sweet at this stage. And Scott promised they’d get better and better as time goes on.  Awesome!  If you’ve used the older versions of the Windows Azure portal, SDKs, and Visual Studio integrations, you know they’ve all matured into things that remove friction from our daily development goals.  The notion they’ll mature more is even more awesome (yes I use the word awesome quite often).

The statistics he shared from Azure were just as impressive, here’s a few screen shots:

1) The footprint of the data-centers around the world, and a few more coming online soon;

2) Interesting adoption stats ranging from authentication to Visual Studio Online registrations, to requests per second.

3) An updated portal dashboard that displays the development, production, and financial concerns of the portal owner – very slick indeed!

azure.footpring azure.stats portal.makeover

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April 25, 2014

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Community

More Signal. Less Noise.

signal.not.noise

I’ve been pushing a lot of content to this blog for a while, off and on. And I don’t have a big habit of blogging much but when I do, it’s something that’s jumped out at me while.

That would be the “why” of sharing on a blog. Not a chatty blogger either, I usually try to get the point w/o rambling too much and lose a reader in mesh of “whos-a-whats-it?”

I’ve got a few hobbies: my Harley, photography, cooking, painting, and technology to blog about for the moment. I’m trying to find a way to get food into my blog more – not a yelp.com approach, but more about why and what food. And not some half-baked (pun intended) post that’s just noise.

So my goal for the year (and blog), and onward is to provide more signal than noise to readers by use of pictures, links, quotes, and how they relate to my interests, but more specifically about the topics I mentioned.

Ok – that’s a wrap!

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April 30, 2013

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Cloud, Technology

Clouds Need to Make Rain, right?

Clouds Need to Make Rain, right?So I’ve been working on this cloud stuff off and on for a few months now.  And while the cloud vendors try to make it easy to work with cloud stuff, things aren’t always intuitive unless you clear your mind and don’t try to do what you remember, but actually how you’re being told they need to work.

Then after taking your code around the block a few times, you take something someone else coded or created and make it your own.  Most of the time it works this way, but there are times when it doesn’t and you just have to apply brute force and push that rock back up the hill.  And once you do the first time, everything starts to click (and work).

I guess the idea here is working with cloud technology is fun, and challenging but you have to keep your eyes on what you set out to build initially and not get bogged down in why something doesn’t work.

If if  doesn’t work, start from scorched earth, as in, throw away *all of your code you just wrote* (hard to do sometimes) and start all over.  I did yesterday and tossed about 1,000 lines of source code – and worked around a problem in about 15 minutes I’d been dealing with for a while.

Of course there were other (positive) external forces that helped me get beyond the block I was experiencing, but scorched earth was the right, first, step to take.

And as it worked out, my piece of the cloud started raining on the scorched earth and once all of the smoldering finished, I had something really nice to work with and continue working with.

HTH – oFc