Easter Musings

Hello! Easter is here already; we’re 1/4 of the way through 2015, the clocks have gone forward, and for the first time in a long time it was warm enough for me to venture outside without a hat.

New Year Musings

Hello! And Happy New Year!

I’ve spent much of the past month off work looking after my daughter whilst my wife is at work. It seems that while this time of year is quiet for me at the office, in the NHS its the busiest period of the year. So it has been great to spend time with Phoebe at home, which has resembled a building site since the end of October. Indeed, as I work from home I have had to move the computer from into 5 different times whilst work was completed. During that time I’ve learnt more things about plumbing than I’ve ever wanted to know, and surprised myself when I kept a remarkably cool head when I noticed water leaking out the ceiling (from the room I had just removed the radiator from successfully (I thought) and whose pipes I had capped) into our living room. And here is some advice which is as unrelated to technology as you’ll ever read on this site, but invaluable nonetheless: try not to reuse caps to cap off radiator pipes, as you have to turn them so tight they tend to break up when you try to use them again. Which is exactly what I had done. I thought they were screwed on well enough until I turned the heating on and water got flowing around the system, which was when the water started to leak out of the busted cap. Fortunately for me no damage was done and I was able to drain the entire heating system, which unfortunately coincided with us living without heating during the coldest days of 2014, until the plastering was done. It’s all part of us paying our dues until the house is done. Currently we are without a shower/bath, though mercifully we are not far away from friends who are kind enough to let us use their bathroom.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Blogging

This post has nearly been a year in the making. When I hit the 100 post mark, which was roughly a year into writing this blog, I wanted to share some of my thoughts about blogging and what it meant to me and how someone can start up a blog and still be actively posting a year later. But I decided not to, as I felt a year and 100 posts was not nearly enough time to post anything with any real authority. But 1 year and 100 posts later I still wanted to share my thoughts on blogging. If for nothing else, it’ll be interesting to read this post in 2/3/4 years time and see just how much of what I wrote I still agree with. This post is not definitive; rather, it’s like viewing a junk shop; I’m sure there’ll be something for someone to take home from this collection of thoughts.

Paid In Full

Before I get into what exactly it is that I have paid in full, let’s have Eric B and Rakim drop a beat for you this morning: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7t8eoA_1jQ&w=420&h=315] So, that it’s then, my student debt is paid off! A mere 7 years after leaving university, I have fulfilled my side of the deal. I was going to write a large piece about the state of education today, but I think I’ll just put a link to a sobering news story on the BBCwebsite about the state of the student loan system in the UK.

Firefox OS First Impressions

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks using the ZTE Open, which runs the fledgling Firefox OS, as my main phone. The phone came with version 1.0.1 installed, so not long after I got it I built an Ubuntu VM and flashed my phone to run 1.3. The improvements were noticeable immediately; the screen was far zippier, the keyboard was better laid out, and I was able to use push notifications. The ZTE Open really is an entry level phone, and I’ve read plenty of negative reviews w/r/t it’s specs, but for £60 I think it’s pretty good. Don’t get me wrong, it can’t handle multi-tasking very well, and sometimes apps take a little too long to open, but for what it is, it’s good.

Delusions of Testing

Enter the (Ice)Dragon: Comodo IceDragon Review

Bit of a departure from typical typical subjects today as I provide a quick review of a new web browser I’ve been using for the past few months, Comodo’s IceDragon.

My Two Cents: Goodbye Nokia

Last week Nokia were purchased by Microsoft for something in the region of $5 billion (shocking how vague the figures are when the number is THAT big). For me this was a momentous occasion, as since 1999 I have owned nothing but Nokia’s, save for 18 months on an iPhone, which I traded in for another Nokia. I’m a big Nokia fan and the news that there will be no more Nokia mobiles(at least until 2016) is a massive disappointment.

Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow: Managing Sprints

My Two Cents On TFS Build Server Best Practices

Update August 2016: If you can, use the VSTS Hosted Build Service. If you can’t, then you’d be surprised to know that the Hosted Build Service uses the D2_V2. Which is 2 core, 7GB of RAM. For 1 build agent. So you know…. something to consider there….

(Update 2014: below I mention that 2GB per agent is a good starting point. This is probably not enough if you’re publishing/scripting database changes using sqlpackage.exe, particularly if one of the databases is a multipartitioned data warehouse and you plan on having multiple builds running simultaneously. I’d say 4GB, if you can afford it, per agent for this scenario).

It’s amazing how important build servers are to a team working in Scrum; the team relies on a fast build server that can build and deploy code quickly. A CI Build gives the devs feedback that the code is good to be deployed to the test environment. And the testers rely that the build deploys to the environment rapidly. If it takes 10 minutes to run a CI build and 20 minutes to deploy to a test environment, that’s half hour spent on waiting to test a new feature. Over the period of a sprint, many builds are run, which leads up to a significant amount of time waiting on builds. Invariably the developers and testers whinge that the builds are taking too long, and the boss comes up and asks you to find out why they’re taking so long and speed them up. So based on my experiences here are my thoughts on how you can check that you’ve optimized your builds and build servers as much as you can.