Microserve This

If you develop in the "SOA" space, I highly recommend reading Martin Fowler's great overview of microservices.

Martin thinks that microservices are a very promising architectural style for agile & evolutionary development of services-based solutions, and I tend to agree based on my services-based solution development experiences.

In particular, Martin's characterization of microservices development at Netflix - exposing battle-tested libraries to teams through microservices that they can mash up - is spot-on.  This is a flexible & scalable approach I think, and Netflix has obviously got a lot right on a grand scale.

One of Martin's other great points - albeit probably unexpected to some - is that teams should generally start with monolithic applications then jackhammer them into microservices as needed.

Evolutionary, needs-driven, JIT architecture sometimes seems like "low road" development, making overarchitecting and looking too far ahead tempting; but it is a sound approach in my experience - helping teams find what works and what needs to evolve through refactoring.

Wonder Twins: Bing and Amazon Prime

http://binged.it/1hZyCNj

Here I started searching with Bing more than Google simply because it worked better for me day-to-day: now I get paid for it in Amazon.com gift cards. :}  Booyah!


Between Amazon gift cards for using Bing and Amazon Prime "free" shipping, can we say, "Wonder Twin powers, activate!?"

SoapUI and JDBC Git-R-Done

http://stackoverflow.com/q/19264771/1810429

The free version of SoapUI continues to impress me for functional testing of WCF (or any other) services.

The power & elegance of the free version make it hard to believe that SoapUI Pro isn't worth every penny.

Amazon Not So Prime

Amazon, I tried Prime with Instant Video for nearly 30 days; it was cool...until an update to AIV on my PS3 (over a week ago) left it the only thing on my PS3 that will not respond to controller input.

Update to the app to fix the problem?  Nope.  Support pages or forums that make it clear how to resolve the problem - even roll back to the previous version of AIV?  Nope.  Will I then be continuing with Prime?  Nope. :}

Namecheap It Is

I have used several Internet domain registrars over the years - personally and for clients & employers.  One or more of the following always soured my experience:
    1) Email- and site-delivered upsells abounded. (e.g. GoDaddy)
    2) Ownership changed and management tools & support went south. (e.g. Aplus.net)
    3) Pricing for the registrations themselves or privacy were unreasonable to me. (e.g. Register.com and Network Solutions)

Namecheap is the best combination of price, management features & support, and low upsells I have found.  If you want to register or transfer a domain for personal or business use, I highly recommend Namecheap.

(Disclaimer:  I will get a portion of Namecheap's meager profit if you register a domain through them using the link provided herein.  I still recommend them even if you want to let them keep all their profit.) :}

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

1. Watch Thanksgiving and Christmas movies with my little one: check.
2. Fix a typo in the Eclipse FAQ while working on Android development: check.
3. Turkey dinner with family: next. :}

Restore Firefox's Default Smart Bookmarks Folders

Losing (i.e. deleting) your Most Visited default smart bookmarks folder in Firefox isn't the end of the world; but it is annoying.  If you need a fix for this annoyance, here's a quick tip on Mozilla's support site that helped me restore Firefox's default smart bookmarks folders with one little config change and restarting the browser.  Enjoy!