Forem: Alasdair

People in Scotland?

Alasdair — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 20:07:35 +0000

Who, within the dev.to community, is currently living and/or working in Scotland? Would be interested to know as we are/will be potentially looking for GOOD devs.

Build Teams Using Simplicity

Alasdair — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:12:25 +0000

Microservices, love them or hate them, they are a concept that does allow a humongous project to be divided into smaller manageable duties. This is a perfect approach for software development because it allows autonomous teams to work faster, reducing the management of red tape and bureaucracy. It's a simple statement, but when tasks are split into their simplest form, they are easier to complete. Teams can focus better, innovate better, work closely and be motivated by their speed and empowerment. But what are the subtle benefits software developers stand to gain by using microservices?

"organisations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations" - Conway's law.

This is one of the main reason organisations are moving to microservices but what benefits does this give?

It allows a very large project to be segmented, worked on separately and the components brought together during implementation.
Different departments or capabilities do not have to wait for others to complete their task prior to designing, constructing and re-iterating their part.
It decreases bureaucracies because there is a massive amount of ownership placed on the service team - "you built it, you own it".
Teams can use the technology they want to achieve the task.

However, we believe the most important benefit you gain from the microservice approach is clarity and simplicity.

Teams thrive when they understand the task and its defined with clarity and simplicity.

HOW TO: Create a microservice MVC application in 5 steps with alphie.io

Alasdair — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 21:34:34 +0000

Getting started is always the hard part, in fact, knowing where to start can stop people in their tracks.

To help you out, we have 5 steps to creating your first microservice MVC application which you can edit as a template, scale as required and extend with other services.

Step 1: Login or register

Go to https://platform.alphie.io

Step 2: Create new service

With alphie, you can select from pre-defined templates structures to help you get going quickly. Select "build from template" on the side menu then choose "c# MVC Web Application". Give it a name like "webportal" and click build

Step 3: Create an environment

You are going to need somewhere to launch your new service once it is built. Select "add & manage" under the environments menu.

Give your environment a name and slug or URL you want it to run under. Alphie runs a standard approach of {service_name}-{environment}-{username}.alphie.io for every service so that all services are unique.

Don't forget to click "save".

Step 4: Launch

Now, go to "launch business function" under the services menu, select your new service from the drop down and your environment. Go ahead and click "launch".

Step 5: Test & Manage

Now that the service is up and running its time to test and manage. Click on the "manage" item under the services menu. Here you can see the unique URL of your service. Go ahead and click it, this should open a new window and hay presto a nice new MVC web application.

From here you can start editing the code under "source code". This will give you the login details and URL for your unique GIT instance. As soon as you edit your code and commit, Alphie will recompile and create a new version which you can launch when ready.

Now go get them!

Time for an Organisation Defrag

Alasdair — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 22:43:57 +0000

For those old enough to remember the days where you would close your eyes before starting the disk defragging process, go and make a coffee, the entire time fingers crossed in the hope that you still had a working computer when you came back.

Over that last couple of years, moving organisations IT estate to a new agile, rapid and responsive design and solutions has felt a little like that.

Actually, organic growth of an organisations IT estate is very similar to the problem disk defragging fixes; siloed applications, poor performance, misused space, delays, and nobody wants to change or fix anything due to fear.

So, what can the now practised discipline of disk defragging teach us about changing our organisation?

Analysis

Understanding the problem is critical. First thing first, you need to completely define and catalogue the estate you are trying to change. Without understanding the interaction between applications you will never be able to define how to get them efficient.

Prioritise

Now that we have a catalogue and definition of how the estate interacts we can define the priority of change based on several parts of your organisation ethos; the appetite for risk, time available to implement change and current understanding of application in question.

Change

Our advice, start small!! Now that we have identified and prioritised the problem we need to fix you need to understand if the team and organisation are ready for it. Start with a simple, well-understood application that has a tangible impact on the day to day running of the business and start a small team to improve all or part of it. From here, it's a publicity machine... Create rapid success, shout about it and continue to push.

So, how can alphie.io help?

Getting investment for large-scale change can be difficult but this is where we come in. To test the concept and start to move your organisation into an agile and responsive business alphie can be that stepping stone to prove the process while knowing you can scale as required. Our platform service lets you start your team tomorrow and deliver rapidly all at minimal cost.

Become part of that change by registering @ https://www.alphie.io/ and get 14 days free - no credit card or anything required to register.