Eventing Facets · What happened was, at re:Invent 2019 I gave a talk entitled Moving to Event-Driven Architecture, discussing a list of characteristics that distinguish eventing and messaging services. It was a lot of work pulling the material together and I’ve learned a couple of things since then; thus, welcome to the Eventing Facets blog series, of which this is the hub. It’s going to take a while to fill this out ...
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Facet: Push vs Pull · If you want to process events, you can fetch them from the infrastructure or you can have the infrastructure hand them to you. Neither idea is crazy ...
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Facet: Broker vs Serverless · Your event infrastructure might be a service in the cloud or might be an actual computer (or cluster) you connect to. Both choices are perfectly sensible. The trade-offs? It’s complicated ...
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Plague Advice · A couple weeks back “Social Distancing” would’ve been a Big Thinker’s title in The Times, about the Downside Of Facebook. Now it’s a best practice if you care about flattening the COVID-19 curve and saving grandmothers. I’m a believer; recently I tweeted Cancel Everything and I meant it. But this shouldn’t mean that you can’t go outside; or shop; or photograph ...
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Facet: FIFO · When you inject events into the cloud, do you care whether they come out in the same order they went in? If you do, you’ll be asking for “FIFO” (rhymes with “Fly, foe!”) (stands for “First In First Out”). Some software has it, some doesn’t ...
Facet: Point-to-Point vs Pub/Sub · When there’s an event in the cloud, how many different receivers can receive it? There are two plausible answers: Just one, or anyone ...
Facet: Deduping · When you fire an event into the cloud, can you be sure it’ll only come out again once? It turns out that sometimes they come out more often than they go in. This may or may not be a problem in your application. If it is, there are techniques to help work around it ...
On Soaking the Rich · The government of BC, the Canadian province where I live, just released a new budget which, among other things, raises tax on high incomes. Here is an overview. The top marginal tax on incomes over C$220,000 goes from 16.8% to 20.5%. This is just provincial tax; what with the Feds, the total top marginal rate is now 53%. Not everyone is delighted. For example Garth Turner, finance/real-estate blogger, who emits a howl of right-wing grief. I’m comfortable speaking about this since I’m personally affected ...
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Sally Leekie · Happy Valentines! A day that celebrates love comes, in my mind, second only to the one that celebrates giving thanks. I didn’t do roses or chocolate, but I made dinner for a couple of people I love; one of the dishes was improvised and came out well, so this recipe is my valentine to the world ...
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Why Google Did Android · What happened was, in the late stages of my career at Sun Microsystems, as we were sliding into Oracle’s loathsome embrace, I had discovered Android. The programming language was Java, and not a dorky “ME” subset. My employer was saying nice things about it, and I’d long craved something I could both carry in my pocket and program. I discovered it was pretty easy to program and eventually published the Android Diary series in this space, which got pretty lively readership ...
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Seasonturn · It’s still February, winter obviously, and yet there was a bit of chilly sun today to greet 2020’s crocuses, the photo-introduction of which has become an annual ritual in this space ...
Bye-bye Time Machine · I recently switched my backup tool from Apple’s Time Machine to Arq Backup which for my needs is clearly better. And once I’d realized that, I wondered whose needs would be best served by Time Machine. To be honest I’m having a hard time with that ...
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Decarbonization · We’re trying to decarbonize our family as much as we can. We’re not kidding ourselves that this will move any global-warming needles. But sharing the story might, a little bit ...
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Orange Badge · One of our admin people walked into my office, saying “Five-year anniversary, new badge, gimme your old one”. Which means I’ve been here five orbits of the sun, my longest job tenure since my seven-year stay last century at a company I co-founded ...
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Jag Diary 11: A Year In · The I-Pace insurance renewal showed up so I knew a year must have (so quickly!) gone by. I’d thought I should write something to draw a line under this diary, and then just now the car saved my life, so now’s the time. Not much new information here but maybe a couple of smiles ...
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Horopito · It’s a place near the center of New Zealand’s North Island; we spent the last Christmas of the decade there. It’s considered remote in NZ which I guess makes it doubly so in the wider world. Unless you’re planning southern-hemisphere skiing you’re unlikely to go near it, so I felt words and pictures worth sharing ...
@bluesky · At my day job they say “Think big!”, and @bluesky is that. I can’t stop thinking about it, and bloggers can’t help thinking in public. This work can simultaneously be probably-doomed and obviously-worthwhile ...
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Content-based Filtering · The publish/subscribe pattern is central to data in motion — event-driven and messaging-based apps, I mean. I’m increasingly convinced that pub/sub software just isn’t complete without some sort of declarative filtering technology, so that you can subscribe to a huge shared torrent of data and only see the parts of it that you need to process. You could look at everything and write code to reject the data you don’t care about, but it’s nice to write a declarative rule and have the system take care of the filtering for you ...
The Oil Patch Up Against the Wall · I’m terribly worried about how my children — and humans in general — are going to deal with catastrophic global warming in the likely case that the average global temperature spike is somewhere in the 2°-4°C range. I want to highlight a couple of weekend stories on the biggest news story of the twenty-first century: The tragedy of the deniers, and likely consequences for the perpetrators ...
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