Presenting Apache Kafka at AJUG

I'll be presenting about Apache Kafka at AJUG in March.

http://www.meetup.com/atlantajug/events/99878712/

I'll post up the slides after the presentation and may even have a video this time.

"Web Scale Architecture" study group

While reading about Netflix' downtime on Christmas Eve 2012 a thought entered my mind: I wonder what thinks about this?

From this thought came an idea for a study group at work. Our focus? Studying "web scale" architectures. Of course "web scale" can mean anything, so we decided to focus on things around best practices in Resiliency of systems, occasionally looking at cool algorithm implementations and 'how they built it' articles.

Of course there is no one book (and while we have a book budget, buying a bunch of books to read one chapter isn't a wise use of it!) we are instead looking at articles, blogs and videos.

Today was our first meeting (12-1 during lunch) and we had a very eclectic group of people in the room. Many software engineers, a few architects, a couple of DevOps, a couple of QA, a Security Engineer and a few product managers. We had a very good discussion about 'falling over' and the CircuitBreaker pattern.

Here is what we looked at.

Netflix blog about Resilient Systems:

http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/12/making-netflix-api-more-resilient.html

Circuit Breaker Pattern description from HubSpot:

http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/bid/64543/Building-a-Robust-System-Using-the-Circuit-Breaker-Pattern

Sample source code:

http://thatextramile.be/blog/2008/05/the-circuit-breaker

We of course went off a few tangents, but overall I really enjoyed discussing this with such a diverse group of people.

I am going to try to update this blog after each meeting in case you too are interested in learning about this stuff.

What does it mean to be a Senior Engineer?

Read a great blog post today about what it means to be a 'senior engineer'. Applicable to pretty much any discipline not just engineering. Same can be said for 'senior mechanics' or 'senior plumbers'.

http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/

This blog linked to a second blog with some great Fatherly advice for a son:

http://blog.stephenwyattbush.com/2012/04/07/dad-and-the-ten-commandments-of-egoless-programming

My favorite is definitely:

"Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience. Non-technical people who deal with developers on a regular basis almost universally hold the opinion that we are prima donnas at best and crybabies at worst. Don’t reinforce this stereotype with anger and impatience."