Tech Blog of Stephen Souness

From CPAN to Design Patterns Throughout my career I've benefited greatly from being able to utilise open source software that other developers have produced and made freely available. Some of my earliest commercial project work benefitted from libraries made available for Perl via the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). It sometimes felt like our company had a huge advantage over organisations that used VB Script for developing ASP pages, as they seemed to be tied into the world of closed source and needing to pay to use libraries that other organisations had developed as a licensed product for sale. In the early two thousands I was continuing my university studies as a part time student while working as a software developer. One of the distributed systems courses gave me some exposure to JBoss and Tomcat, which made me question why we were paying to use commercial application servers for some of our clients' projects in my day job. Aside from the common day to day help...

Introduction In my opinion the old stereo type of expert developers being left on their own to solve the big problems isn't the way that robust software should be developed. As often as not when you hear a story about hero developers who are often arrogant and / or jaded about their experiences and are not open to collaborating. That doesn't make for a nice workplace, or sustainable product development. If you Google'd "no assholes" you will probably be presented with a long list of articles and blog posts describing how organisations have come to the realisation that it is in their interests to not hire or tolerate individuals who are not team players - even if they are the best in their area of expertise. (NB: In this context I don't mean "team player" in the sense of being pushovers who just do what they are told). This is yet another post of me trying to remind myself about what I've been doing to work well within a team - a nice refresher be...

Introduction These days I consider myself to mainly be a developer, but with a solid background in getting services and apps operational. This post is intended to focus on some of the work that I have done so far in my career that I would consider as being more focussed on the operations side of technology-driven projects.  It can be read as background to my appreciation of the DevOps approach to developing and deploying applications. If you came to read about my medical history then that is also covered here: I've never had an operation. University days Personal hardware Back in the 90s PCs were still the dominant home computer, and as my brother was into electronics and electrical engineering I went down the path of assembling my first proper computers from components. The level of component that I'm referring to here is consumer-accessible ready-made modules rather than individual chips and circuit boards. I never took up a soldering iron in anger. So, when I had enough of...