This is my first attempt at talking about what is going on with Cloud Native applications these days. Given at IndexConf in San Francisco.

I will absolutely confess that it was daunting to start with, but that once I was out on the stage, everything was fine.

I will also confess to ad nauseum rehearsal. To reciting what I had to cram into two segments (one only 2 minutes long, and the other 2 minutes and 30 seconds) to every inanimate object in my hotel room: lamps, laptops, mirrors, showerheads, and I’m pretty sure my pillow while I was sleeping.

I didn’t really wrap my head around what I wanted to say until the night before. Things just didn’t fall into place before then. But hey, I lived! It was quite the experience.

Watch the #SpringOne mainstage lightning talks on Distributed Systems, featuring @cdavisafc, @meaghnk, @midatlantictez, @ebullientworks, and Mathangi Venkatesan. https://t.co/PVxlz1ta5V

— Pivotal (@pivotal) December 13, 2017

I spent an excellent few hours recording a podcast with Adam Bien.

CORBA? OpenLiberty? Robots? The glory days of object marshaling? Such a trip down memory lane! We could easily have talked for another hour.

Can you hear my rings clinking on my favorite mug? Yes, yes you can.

Give it a listen: Java EE ebullience.

We shall see how this goes over time, but so far? Oh hell yes.

I am experimenting with a cute little app (I have, sad to say, fallen head over feet into the Apple ecosystem. Other devices might seem cool, but not worth the gymnastics. Ecosystem stickiness is a thing.) that allows me to edit. code. from. my. iPad.

Why would I want to do that?

• Device junky that I am, I totes splurged and got an iPad Pro, with its little keyboard.
• I would really really really like to make more entries to this blog, for example. This is a nice alternative to hauling laptop around.
• I want to see how far I can push this über tiny device thing, that ALSO happens to have a stylus (yes, I am one of those people that thinks better long-hand).

So exciting!

The one challenge with this, in particular, is that I can’t get the Jekyll preview that I could if I were running locally. The iPad Pro is quite the workhorse… but it doesn’t (yet, ha!) run Docker containers.

Oh, right. The app: Working Copy. It also integrates with iOctocat.

It took me a few tries (divided attention #FTW), but I realized that after messing with blogs for over 10 years, I’ve seen all the things! Way back in the beginning was Movable Type (which I didn’t realize was still a thing), followed by PHP-based CMS like Textpattern and Nucleus CMS, and then a brief flirtation with Blogger (someone made me do it). I have somehow avoided ever having to maintain templates for WordPress (?!). These systems all come back to some pretty basic concepts around templating.

The one snag was loathing having to do anything with ruby. I have never had anything but grief and pain installing ruby anywhere. But hey! We have docker now! Put it in a container and forget about it. WOOT!

Yes, I confess, I did .. umm.. censor my blogs over the years. When facebook arrived, blog posts about nasty headaches and reactions to the latest headlines could all go away. The exodus of content continued with the advent of Twitter. Which left this blog, which I’ve tended on and off for close to 14 years, in the lurch!

There is also the small matter of how much time I have to spend on blog posts between work, kids, and this mammoth garden we have going in the back yard. The mammoth garden is totally my fault, we started it as an excuse to get me outside. It worked.

However, it has become obvious that a return to blogging is overdue. To start with, Game On! needed a blog! We kept having little tidbits to share, that needed a home. I made an initial foray into creating a blog with Jekyll to build a new blog for Game On!. I kind of liked how that worked, AND it meant I could stop having to edit posts via the web, and so I’ve now brought that to my own blog, too.

Next post: the jekyll stuff.

Microservices: the buzz is everywhere. Given the breadth of technologies related to the term, it can be difficult to get a full picture of what a Microservices architecture should look like, or to understand why it is said that microservices architectures both remove and introduce complexity at the same time. Game On! is a throwback text-based adventure built to help you explore microservices concepts.

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I’ve been working for the past few months on building Game On! a microservices-based application that is intended to show both what a microservices architecture looks like, and to make it easy for people to play with such a system without having to start from the ground up themselves.

We started with a best-guess set of services, and over time, it became pretty apparent that our first pass at a map building service (the Concierge) was both misleading in purpose and insufficient in function. It did serve its purpose, filling in for service discovery in a way, but we were growing beyond what the service could do.

I’ve run a somewhat odd little script to generate my command prompt for years now, sets some colors, adds some indicators of what kind of shell I’m in (sudo or tmux/screen or ssh or.. ).

Given I now have to work with git and submodules, I’ve revised that to include information provided about git generated by this script: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh

The difference is worth it, in understanding at a glance what is going on without typing git status or variant every two seconds. ;)

I’ve also been using some very useful aliases to make working with submodules sane, as documented here: Game On! Advanced Adventures / Git Submodules

Home to Microservices and WAS Liberty resources, which provide background information, getting started guidance, best practices, and methodologies.

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