I wanna talk to you about failing. Nowadays we’re taught that failing is a good thing, to fail fast and to learn from our mistakes. But how are we supposed to do that when we’re conditioned to see failing as bad from a very young age? Now I’m not suggesting that we avoid the entire notion of failure because it’s inevitable in life, and building resilience is a positive thing. But if all we ever talk about is embracing failure, failing fast and learning from mistakes… well that’s gonna get pretty demoralising! I’d like to share with you a different...
Continue reading...Fast Spring Boot AWS Lambdas with GraalVM
In my previous blog post I documented how to take a Java Spring Boot application and convert it into a serverless function, which can be run in the likes of AWS Lambda. Anyone who’s done this before knows that cold starts are a big downside – Java and Spring Boot are not known for their speedy startup times, and a typical full fat Spring Boot converted lambda can take anything from 10 to 90 seconds depending on how much memory and cpu you allocate it. This may lead you over-provision them to compensate for the cold starts, but that’s a...
Continue reading...From Spring Boot Microservices to Lambda functions – a journey
You may be one of many organisations (or an engineer in one) that operates Java microservices in the cloud with a desire to move towards a serverless architecture, but are unable to justify the steep migration path (e.g. decomposing your services into functions, rewriting in a more suitable language etc.) from those microservices to the likes of AWS Lambda. But fear not! Because with the help of spring-cloud-function you can repurpose your existing microservices into serverless functions in a gradual and controlled manner, with minimal effort or interruption of service. In this article I’ll explain how you can achieve this...
Continue reading...My expedition from AWS to GCP (with Terraform)
Follow along with my GitHub repo for this blog: https://github.com/foyst/gcp-terraform-quickstart/ TL;DR – Here’s the headline differences that might be useful for those adopting GCP from an AWS background: Difference #1 In AWS, projects or systems are separated using AWS Accounts, where as GCP has the built-in concept of “Projects”. Difference #2 – The GCP Console is always at global level – no need to switch between regions. Difference #3 – auto_create_subnetworks = false, otherwise you have a subnet created for every availability zone by default. Difference #4 – You have to enable services before you can use them. Difference #5...
Continue reading...Team Development Roadmaps
As engineers we spend so much time focusing on the client’s projects, developing Impact Maps, Story Maps, Stakeholder Maps… all sorts of maps to confirm our approach and provide shared understanding between everyone and a strategy for solving the problem. What often doesn’t get considered is how the members of the team can use the opportunities within a project to improve and learn. Making sure that your team feel challenged and invested whilst providing a safe space helps them to feel valued and be at their natural best. At Infinity Works we strive to be “Best for Client, Best for...
Continue reading...To be successful, you’ve got to take the lead
I have been doing a lot of reflection recently. I want to become a great leader – to be a servant to others, to drive myself and those in my charge towards a Just Cause that we all aspire towards. In doing this I’ve been figuring out what to focus on in order to help myself and others achieve greatness in everything we do. But if you want to be successful in leading others, you first need to be able to lead yourself. What does that even mean? Here are some ideas I’ve read about recently which really resonate with...
Continue reading...Performance Tuning Next.js
TL;DR: Next.js 9.3 introduces getStaticPaths, which allows you to generate a data-driven list of pages to render at build time, potentially allowing you to bypass server-side rendering for some use cases. You can now also use the fallback property to dynamically build pages on request, and serve the generated html instead. On a recent project we built a website for a client using a combination of Next.js and Contentful headless CMS. The goal of the website was to offer a responsive experience across all devices whilst keeping load times to a minimum and supporting SEO. I rather like Next.js –...
Continue reading...Booking a Meeting Room with Alexa – Part Two – Coding the Skill
Hey there! In my previous post Booking a Meeting Room with Alexa – Part One, I talk about how to build up the Interaction Model for your Skill using the Alexa Developer Console. Now, I’ll talk about how to write code that can handle the requests. Setting Up I chose to use JavaScript to write the skill, as I wanted to try something a little different to Java which is what I normally use. Alexa has an SDK that allows you to develop Skills in a number of languages including Java and Javascript, but also C#, Python, Go and probably...
Continue reading...Booking a Meeting Room with Alexa – Part One
Hey there! This is part one into my adventures of developing an Alexa skill. I was inspired recently on client site, where I saw they’d installed a shiny new room booking system. Each meeting room had a touch screen setup outside of it, and from it you could see who’d booked the room, and also use it to book the room out if it was available. It had the right idea, but from talking to people I learnt that it wasn’t the most user-friendly, and that it had cost a pretty penny too! I’d been looking for an excuse to...
Continue reading...