Sounie is back in New Zealand...

I'm just getting set up with my new ".nz" domain name.

For now my other blogs are still set up with my .london domain:

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Speeding up Software Builds for Continuous Integration

Downloading the Internet Can you remember the last time you started out on a clean development environment and ran the build of some software using Maven or Gradle for dependency management? It takes ages to download all of the necessary third party libraries from one or more remote repositories, leading to expressions like, "Just waiting for Maven to download the Internet". Once your development environment has been used for building a few projects the range of dependencies that will need to be downloaded for other builds reduces down as the previously referenced ones will now be cached and found locally on your computer's hard drive. What happens on the Continuous Integration environment? Now consider what goes on when Jenkins or your other preferred Continuous Integration server comes to build your software. If it doesn't have a local copy of the libraries that have been referenced then it is going to pay the cost of that slow " download the Internet" p...

2022 - A year in review

Just a look back over the last 12 months. January I moved back to Christchurch to live, after having spent a few months further south since moving back from London. Work was mainly around balancing other peoples' understanding and expectations around our use of Kafka. February I decided that it would be worthwhile to have a year's subscription for streaming Sky Sports, as some rugby matches that I would want to watch would be on at time when venues wouldn't be open. Having moved to Christchurch to be close to an office, now found myself working from home as Covid restrictions came back into effect across New Zealand. March Got back into some actual coding at work - as opposed to mainly reviewing pull requests for configuration changes for Kafka topics. This became urgent, as the command line interface tool that our provisioning system was dependent on had been marked for deprecation. April Had my first direct experience with Covid-19. I only went for a test because ...

Applying AI to software development can be like following SatNav

Trying out a different navigation system A month or so ago I upgraded to a car that has a SatNav system included, so I have been trying to use that instead of the Maps app on my phone. My experiences with it so far have generally been good, but it is far from flawless - a bit like Artificial Intelligence (AI) in software development. As context, my previous vehicle was not too old to include SatNav, it just hadn't been set up with English language or New Zealand maps - one of the down sides of having a second hand vehicle that originated in Japan. Flawed or incomplete information Driving around central Christchurch can be a bit challenging at times as various roadworks are underway, leaving streets closed off or narrowed down to a single lane. It could be reasonable to expect that a basic navigation system might not have up to the minute awareness of those closures and restrictions. However, something that I did not expect to encounter was the navigation system advising me to expec...

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