DaedTech Digest: Delays, Risk, Visualization and Gigantic Log Files
Another week in the books, marked, as always, by a DaedTech digest post. Another week here in sunny San Diego, marked by a predictable mix of work and fun.
On the work side, we’re building out our tech content agency at what feels like a fairly furious pace. I suppose at some point, I may write DaedTech posts about business and growing an agency, but that seems a little off mission at the moment. (Weigh in if you feel otherwise.) I’m also keeping the dream alive with our boutique codebase assessment practice, so a lot going on.
On the fun side, we spent a great weekend exploring Pacific Beach and La Jolla Beach in San Diego. This included a ton of walking/hiking, sampling meals, appetizers, local beers, and desserts at local establishments, and just generally being outdoors. As someone born and raised in the US Midwest, I can think of nothing better than a winter where it’s perpetually 70 degrees and sunny.
To include you in my joy, here’s a picture of some sea lions we came across while exploring. Don’t let the apparent peacefulness fool you. These things bark like crazy, stink like crazy, and spend most of their time banging their heads against one another. It’s an endlessly amusing spectacle.
Picks
- In case you missed it, DaedTech has a new direction and I’m gaining steam with it. Here’s a category tag for this series I’m going to be working a lot on that basically lays out a guide for how we, as software developers, can take over the software development industry, rather than serving as perpetual grist in its mill.
- I’ve been creakily easing my way back into software development, and Newtonsoft Json.NET provided a nice, gentle landing for not having to bother writing my own logic to parse JSON.
- Speaking of software development, you know about Alexa site rankings? Well, if you want to get that data programatically, you might think you have to deal with AWS’s byzantine SOAP API, public and private keys and all that. Nope. Check this out. That link is a neat little XML payload containing DaedTech’s Alexa rank. Just swap whatever URL you’re curious about for daedtech.com in the URL parameter.
- On the personal front, I pick La Jolla beach, which is where we encountered both the sea lions pictured above and harbor seals. If you’re ever in southern California and you like outdoors/nature, it’s worth a trip.
The Digest
- For Scalyr, I wrote a post describing the problem of having a log file that’s too big to open in an editor. What should you do? In case you couldn’t tell, the target audience for that is more on the newer dev side.
- On the TechTown blog, I did a post exploring how you calculate the cost of delays. This is sort of inline with the Pluralsight course I did once about business cases for best practices.
- For Rollout.io, I explored the relationship between feature toggles and continuous delivery.
- This was a fun one. Visualizing code is important, so I wrote a post for NDepend on tips for visualizing your code.
- I wrote a post for SubMain about low impact strategies for reducing risk in software development.
- And, finally, for the Hit Subscribe blog, I wrote a post about why your blog should be more like a wiki than like a newspaper column.