I love scripts! I treat them as my extended memory. Blog posts used to do this, but life and children have eaten up the capacity I used to have for writing.

But I thought I would share my latest script for the lazy (which I have now duplicated several times. I know, I know. WET, DRY. I can’t be bothered). This script iterates over all of the git repositories in a sub-directory (where I have several related ones), fetches everyting, fast-forwards if it can, and otherwise tries to rebase on the upstream branch if there is one that matches.

There is an extra case statement at the bottom as I inevitably extend this to do more things specific to this group of projects. This kind of approach grew out of the scripts written for Game On!, which still work well, and do their extra duty reminding me what on earth I was doing the last time I worked on it.

Two things collided in my brain this year ahead of SpringOne: Preparing a new talk from scratch covering the Micrometer (and the related Spring implementation), and learning everything I needed to know to be a Dungeon Master for my 10-year-old son and his friends.

Thanks to a brilliant suggestion from a friend, these two things collided in the talk, too. Which lightened the mental load (or at least reduced the amount of full stack swapping going on).

Github repository: ebullient/monster-combat with Spring Boot 2, WebFlux, and Micrometer

I had a gulp build unhelpfully finishing with:

(node:12030) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: null
(node:12030) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection. This error originated either by throwing inside of an async function without a catch block, or by rejecting a promise which was not handled with .catch(). (rejection id: 1)
(node:12030) [DEP0018] DeprecationWarning: Unhandled promise rejections are deprecated. In the future, promise rejections that are not handled will terminate the Node.js process with a non-zero exit code.

So I added this to my gulpfile:

process.on('unhandledRejection', (reason, p) => {
  console.log('Unhandled Rejection at: Promise', p, ', reason:', reason);
});

which netted me this:

Unhandled Rejection at: Promise Promise {
  <rejected> null,
  domain:
   Domain {
     domain: null,
     _events: { error: [Object] },
     _eventsCount: 1,
     _maxListeners: undefined,
     members: [] } } reason: null

Not much better.

Let’s try debugging gulp! How do I do that again?

In VS Code, let’s create a debug configuration that is brain-bashingly simple. Add this to launch.json:

      {
        "type": "node",
        "request": "attach",
        "name": "Attach to Remote",
        "address": "127.0.0.1",
        "port": 9229,
        "localRoot": "${workspaceFolder}/resources",
        "remoteRoot": "Absolute path to the remote directory containing the program"
      }

Now launch gulp with some options. I’m using npx here because I detest npm install -g:

$ npx -n --inspect-brk gulp build

This process will now wait until VS Code attaches. At which time, do check the “Uncaught Exceptions” box in the breakpoint section of the debug panel.

Press play, and .. there it is. A much clearer picture of what tipped over. I feel so much better.

(Hope this helps, future self)

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, grr), 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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