Docker Containers & Clustering/Orchestration
The Big Picture
The aim of this blog post isn’t to get into the nitty gritty how to build and run a containerized app on your favorite cloud provider with a specific clustering technology. Rather, the aim is to discuss containers - where they came from, how they differ from VMs, scalability considerations, container repositories, running containers locally, what a container image consists of, and finally clustering and orchestration tools available to manage and maintain your container…
January 20, 2018
How to Integrate GitHub PRs with Bamboo CI
Bamboo / GitHub integration isn't perfect – perhaps because Atlassian wants to steer you towards Bitbucket (their GitHub competitor). Out of the box, there are several headaches. Below, I'll cover these, and how to solve each one:
January 18, 2018
Grokking Bamboo CI/CD, for beginners
We are heavy users of Bamboo for Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI / CD). It's extremely flexible, integrates well with Jira, and elastic build agents make the most of AWS EC2 (even giving you the option of spot pricing for on-demand instances).
January 18, 2018
My daily use of the Five Levels of Leadership
Over a year ago, I read John Maxwell’s “The Five Levels of Leadership”. Since then, I’ve grown increasingly reliant on it’s simple model.
January 16, 2018
Want to get your product to market faster? Hire a Scrum Master.
In the practice of Agile Project Management, it has long been assumed that a Scrum Master (also referred to at Metal Toad as Agile Project Manager) is an integral member of any successful Scrum team. Whether it’s through day-to-day facilitation and coaching or the removal of project impediments, the Scrum Master’s value is largely presumed, but sometimes challenged. Recently, my team and I were wondering what value a Scrum Master brings to a Scrum team.
January 15, 2018
Spatial analysis with PostgreSQL and OpenStreetMap
I've always been a map geek, dating back to the 1980s when I would take a road atlas and some tracing paper and draw in my own road network. And one of my favorite games is to take an old map or globe and try to determine when it was made based on the names and shapes of countries. In the age of online mapping software, big data, and data science, it gets even more interesting. Now I can download the whole data set for the map and write programs against it!
January 8, 2018
Resolution: Talk to Users in 2018
It’s the end of the year and you’re thinking:
“I did a pretty good job this year. I launched several new high-profile initiatives. Thousands more customers are using the application. I didn’t break anything (that couldn’t be fixed). Man, this year was so busy! Who’s got time to talk to users?”
You do. Make time.
December 27, 2017
The Four Quadrants of IoT Revenue Streams
The next decade will bring a society-changing transformation to smart, connected things throughout our personal, professional, and public lives. Everything about this change is big: the security risks are big, the improvements are big, and the scale is big. This change is a prime space to find new revenue opportunities for every product and service business.
December 23, 2017
How wasted inventory shows up in software development
In software, a feature backlog is no different than a warehouse of slowly rotting, unused goods. When you think of software features, think of inventory that is wasting away unless it is delivered to a customer.
December 16, 2017
The 3 Paths for Digital Transformation
There's a lot of talk about digital transformation these days. I think undoubtably this movement - transforming as many processes from analog to digital - is going to be the heart of value for business for at least the next 50 years into the future. That said, there three major ways for companies to "go digital":
December 12, 2017