Monorepo Build Tools
In the software development world, there is a growing trend of using monorepos to manage codebases. A monorepo is a single repository that contains the co...
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Bullshit Software Projects
I was frying a couple of dozen walnut crunch when I first got in trouble at Tim Horton’s. Tim Horton’s is a donut and coffee place, and I worked there as ...
Containers are chroot with a Marketing Budget
Every explanation is a simplification. There are many ways to understand how containers work, but most useful explanations are actually simplificatio...
When to use Bazel?
Bazel Build? Here at Earthly, we care a lot about builds and talk to many people about their struggles with builds and CI. A frequent topic of conversatio...
Stop saying 10x developer
Here is part of a rather infamous Twitter thread: 10x engineers rarely look at help documentation of classes or methods. Given a product feature, they ca...
The Slow March of Progress in Programming Language Tooling
The 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey is out! And what’s fascinating to me is which popular programming languages are either loved or dreaded.1 The ...
Using Homebrew on M1 Mac
Homebrew made some changes to where it installs packages if you are running it on a new M1 Mac, and these changes may throw you for a loop if you’re moving ...
CI Free Tier Showdown
How Much Can You Get For Free? Here at Earthly, we care about your CI/CD dollar. That’s why we decided to pit the free tiers of four of the top CI/CD plat...
The (Opinionated) Way We Interview Engineers
Interviewing engineers is an impossible task. You have to use a few hours to figure out if a person will be a good employee for several years to come. No pr...
Watch People Doing the Thing
I’ve learned so much from watching other people code. It’s never a thing I’m specifically trying to learn. It’s more like someone is walking me through a pr...
What About A Plain Text Web
TLDR: Go to https://earthly-tools.com/text-mode?url=https://yoururl.com to get a readable, plain text version of a webpage. Background We have this new...
One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions
Sometimes smart people working hard make things worse. The following story is based my recollection of some real events: Scheduling Work Problems A smal...
How Blue-Green Deployments Work in Practice
Remember when systems would go offline to implement changes and updates? Sometimes you still get emails from applications with notifications of downtime, ap...
Printf Debugging and Srinivasa Ramanujan
The Visual Studio debugger is fantastic. When I was a C# developer, I used it all the time. A typical pattern was putting a breakpoint on a failing a...
The Canary Deployment Strategy and When to Use It
As you’re building your application, you want to ensure that your customers have a bug-free user experience as much as possible. Since bugs show up most oft...
Understanding Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Deployment
Computing has reached an unprecedented point in speed, capability, storage, and scale, elevating user expectations for product innovation. To deliver agains...
Career Advice: Be Confidently Uncertain
“OH GAWD” Around the time of the subprime mortgage collapse, I was working in an enterprise software company. I worked in a large open space full of cubic...
The Platform Values of Earthly
As creators of a new approach to build automation, we have always strived to create products that we ourselves would have wished we had. While this may sound...
Idiots And Maniacs
Observability If you do software-as-a-service development and you have paying customers, you at some point learn about the need for operational monitoring...
SQL Errors and Video Cameras
Some years ago, when I worked in a physical office, I was having trouble with a new report I was developing. The reasonably complex SQL that generated the ...
The 15-Minute Project
Applying city planning to software development
Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders
Here is a somewhat fictionalized personal story. I’ve changed the names of the people and the technology used. Raising Objections I was a new engineerin...
Getting a Repeatable Build, Every Time
I wanted to sit down and write about all the tricks we learned and that we used every day to help make builds more manageable in the absence of Earthly.
What Is Continuous Integration?
Continuous integration has become prevalent in software development, but it’s still a complex and wide-ranging topic. In this post, we’ll cover the basics o...
Green Vs. Brown Programming Languages
I’ve noticed something interesting about the types of programming languages people like. It’s something that doesn’t seem to come up in various discussions o...
On YAML Discussions
My article about how YAML makes a bad programming language 1 generated a lot of great discussions online. Here are some highlights, lightly edited: Conf...
Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in
So I’ve been using my new M1-based MacBook Pro for a couple of months for a mix of development, email, and other things an open-source maintainer does day-t...
INTERCAL, YAML, And Other Horrible Programming Languages
In 1972, two students learning FORTRAN came up with a fantastic new programming language called INTERCAL.
Monorepo vs Polyrepo
The decision of whether to use a monorepo or a polyrepo structure for your source code can be a very emotional (maybe even religious!) battle. On its surfac...
5 Blogs for Scala’s Birthday
The public release of Scala was 17 years ago today. The language and its community are certainly not standing still, so I’ve put together a list of my favo...
Top 3 Resources For Learning GoLang in 2021
Why Learn Go If I were a system administrator looking to learn a new programming language it would be Go.So many of our tools including Kubernetes, Prom...
Migrating Your Open Source Builds Off Of Travis CI
Starting in early December, a mad dash has been underway to migrate open-source projects off of Travis CI. What happened and where should you move your proj...
Unit Testing vs Integration Testing
In 1998, Kent Beck wrote sUnit, a unit testing framework for SmallTalk. Beck later ported this framework to Java as jUnit. From there, xUnit frameworks spre...
You’re using docker-compose wrong
Tell me if this sounds familiar? You were introduced to docker-compose either by choice or by force. You’ve been using it for a while, but you find it clun...
Technology choice? Don’t be weird
Here at Earthly, we are building an internal platform on AWS using EKS. I talked to our lead architect Corey Larson about the decisions and trade offs he is...
Building on Kubernetes: Ingress
Here at Earthly, we are building an internal platform on AWS using EKS. I talked to our lead architect Corey Larson about the decisions and trade offs he is...