Blog Insights

In the software world, there are often new technologies coming to market, new fields to explore, new techniques to use, etc. Filtering through these in itself can be a challenge. Deciding when to move forward with one in practical applications can be even harder. Many times as developers, we will...

Source Allies is proud to be involved in many charitable endeavors such as dsmHack, Hyperstream and Tech Journey. Tech Journey is a 501c(3) non-profit founded in 2013 by my friend Tony Kioko and my teammate David Kessler. Tech Journey was created to inspire youth with limited resources in Des Moines...

class Car { numberOfWheels: number; color: string; } function describeCar(car : Car){ return "Number of Wheels: " + car.numberOfWheels + " Color: " + car.color; } var car = {numberOfWheels: 4, color: "Red"}; document.body.innerHTML = describeCar(car); That’s...

I've been pairing for over a decade. I've witnessed and tried all kinds of things shoulder-to-shoulder with all kinds of pairing partners. Through the years I've witnessed a single consistent misfire while pairing. We don't understand our roles. As professional problem solvers we gravitate towards actively solving the problem at hand. Similarly, my...

In a previous post, I mentioned that in order to have a successful DevOps experience, there were some key components and principles that need to be implemented. In this post, I'll cover those components in more detail....

In a previous article we discussed some of the positive characteristics of microservices that we've found while implementing them in a production setting. Two of the primary benefits we discussed are the architectural agility and enforcement of api boundaries. While you may find those and many more benefits from using microservices, you will also find that the positives don't...

What I want to cover in this post is the experience that I had transitioning from a traditional development role to DevOps and what I learned to be useful in that transition. One of the nice things that I experienced with DevOps was that it pushes developers to take more ownership of their...

A recent topic grabbing the stage in the software community is the use of Microservice Architectures. Microservice architectures are often sold as a great way to enhance a project's agility over a standard, monolithic architecture. While this can certainly be the case, and there are indeed many benefits from using microservices, the...

Motivated by the introduction of Lambdas in Java 8, I wrote a couple of examples to see how difficult it would be to follow a functional programming paradigm in real production code. I will demonstrate using some features from Java 8 with a simple and fun example. The application basically gets the...

About a month ago, I facilitated the first event as part of the Source Allies external mentoring program known as Source Allies University (SAU). It was an interactive forum and networking event designed to: I want to thank my employer, Source Allies, for offering the workshop, and Kaplan University for graciously hosting the...