Wilcox Development Solution's Blog

The trend, to the great benefit of the software industry, is to have separate career paths for management and non-management people (“individual contributors”).

My early history with Rapid Application Development Tools As a teenager I played with Hypercard, Userland Frontier - with MacBird of course, and FutureBasic.

An Architecture Notebook Sometimes changes in a codebase are straight forward, sometimes they require a bit of research and investigation before some kind of architecture or design document is created.

The quest for request makers As a backend developer I’m often looking to make some one-off requests to test new API endpoints, or to explore some returned data.

Rash and Unix Exit Codes I continue to play with Rash as a language for small shell scripts I know I’ll have to enhance over time.

GToolkit provides AST analysis tools for Javascript & others!

A long while ago I - Ryan Wilcox - wrote an article for Toptal on Behavior Driven Development (or BDD).

The term “software artifact” is often seen as being about only the runnable bits of a program: what’s the steps to getting ideas to bits running on machines.

Intro In a long standing blog patterns start to emerge.

My Personal History with Early Blogging Tools: From Jan 15, 2002 until Feb 18, 2009 I kept a personal blog with Radio Userland.

DuckDB Explorations: Approaching data persistence in exploratory situations In software, I believe exploration and experimentation means a delicate balance of just enough infrastructure, easily changed decisions, simplicity until the last possible moment,…

Leading Technical Change across the Herd.

Some Background: The Remarkable tablet The Remarkable is an e-ink powered device that leans into writing as an experience.

Intro In June 2023 I explored intermediate functional programming patterns in JavaScript.

How to quickly iterate on your private Node libraries You’re fixing a bug and turns out the problem is in some private library of yours!

Intro A mid-2010s style MERN stack separates out backend and frontend concerns into separate deployable units (which we’ll call “projects” here), resulting in an architecture that looks something like this for a consumer web app with admin backend: d Cons…

Intro Functional programming means different things to different people.

Playing with GToolkit’s Lepiter Notebook and its support for Node.js cells One of the components of GToolkit is Lepiter, a knowledge base excutable notebook.

Introduction CircleCI recently announced an extension for Visual Studio Code, allowing you to view the status of your CircleCI pipelines.

These days most of my analysis - or even short scripts!

Scaling Specialized Expertise Modern software engineering is very enabling to an individual engineer, but with that enablement comes complexity.

Introduction: Setting the stage Years ago I explored writing system level tools in Groovy.

Introduction What is functional programming?

In this DevOps world deployment diagrams help document not just how a system relates to other components, but how the underlaying infrastructure configuration is structured.

Note: previously I tried to keep personal stuff off this blog, and have that be on another site.

My 2021 Year In Books 2021 saw a lot of reading and thinking and - mostly, except towards the end - not a lot of new tech.

Some senior+ developer roles have a lot going on.

Intro For a good sized microservice herd it’s important to know how these services relate to each other.

I made a video about how gtoolkit’s Wardley Map functionality works.

Intro Ansible is a configuration management, multi-machine task running, DevOps automating declarative devops tool.

Intro In my earlier software projects and planes of growth I posited that software projects have five steps of growth: foundations, testing, specialization, process, stabilization, and self actualization.

I draw a lot of diagrams at work.

In grooming and backlog refinement in software we find ourselves breaking functionality into epics, which then have many stories, and - from here I like to break stories explicitly into behaviors, or at least acceptance criteria.

A few days of vacation for me usually means a time to relax, recharge a bit, do things with the family, catch up on TODO items, and play with new tech I’ve been meaning to play with or make progress on projects of my own.

Introduction We’re all familiar with the idea of technical debt in software, where the velocity of development is hampered by code not being ideally suited for the task at hand.

Introduction In my previous blog article I said: This is the topic of a future blog post: roads and feature capacity of microservice herds.

Herds of microservices, flocks of people, and those that take care of them I’ve been in big enterprises, as a day job, for almost 6 years now.

The Problem In 2020 I realized I had a problem.

I finally did it: I moved this blog to Gatsby This blog has made its second transition: first, from MovableType to Wordpress, then from WordPress to GatsbyJS.

Introduction Containers give us a way to package software and ensure that the software etc we expect installed is, in, fact, installed.

I’ve been working with Jenkins quite a bit lately.

Introduction I’ve been playing with Gatsby.js.

For early stage experiments I like deploying to Heroku.

This weekend I took the time to play with Bitbucket Pipelines, a new feature from Bitbucket.

Introduction Posted on this blog as comments may be insightful.

I’m constantly looking for new innovations that I can use on brown-field projects.

I like Puppet with Vagrant.

Introduction: Setting the stage Lately I’ve found myself turning to Groovy for — oddly enough — system level development tasks.

A Vagrant setup that supports my blog entry on “Vagrant / Puppet and Hiera Deep Dive”.

Today I had to use the CSV Node Module.