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...
Archive of Articles
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...