For those of you who are new to the series, you may want to check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 before reading this post. It will help give you some context as well as introduce you to some of the jargon and technology that I’m using. If you’ve already read then, or don’t want to, then please read on!

Upon finishing Part 3 of the series we were finally able to read data from Riak and see it appear in our web page. This was the first stage in seeing a full end-to-end web application functioning. Of course there is still a great deal to do!

Webmachine is currently my favourite tool for building websites. I’ve been lucky enough to use it on a few things now, some commercially some personally. While working on my Erlang web development series I had to handle the case where URLs redirected to other URLs. I found some basic documentation on this but wasn’t able to find a canonical example of how to do it.

After a big of digging through blog posts and speaking to people on IRC I figured out how it was done. The goal of this post is to show how it’s done for 301 (permanent) and 307 (temporary) redirects.

The topic of tools is often a hot one amongst developers and every year we see an influx of blog posts where people rant and rave about which ones they love the most, and why.

Far be it from me to stay out of such a discussion!

Here is a list of the tools that I use as of the end of January 2012. Some are simply noteworthy. Others are very handy and while I would get by without them they would be missed. Some of these I simply cannot live without. I’m not going to bother with ratings. I won’t go into frameworks or the like which make their way into my code, instead I am focussing on those tools which help me do the coding and which aid me in my general computer usage.

Some of these tools are platform-specific, but many can be used across different platforms.

I was about to head to bed when I stumbled across a poorly-titled article on news.com.au. At first I thought it was going to cover off the best locations around Australia, or perhaps the world, for finding work in a variety of industries. It turned out to be a failed attempt at highlighting the key growth industry areas for jobs in Australia.

It began like this:

JOBS demanded across several booming sectors will be the best place to find work this year.

Despite the appalling structure and lack of coherence of the opening paragraph I pushed on through the rest of the article, hoping to find some interesting or useful information. Most of content would be fairly obvious to almost every Australian. The bits that could be considered interesting were old news, and nothing in the article made me feel that reading it was a good use of time.

I can clearly remember the first time I got involved in an Agile project – it was back in 2004, it was in London and in the finance industry (insurance to be exact). When I joined the project the team was small though over time it become much bigger.

While on that gig I met and worked with a few of the nicest and best devs that I’ve worked with (RobG, Yoann and The Chief).

It was an exciting project. We were using XP in very much its purest sense, right from the beginning. We always paired up to do our programming, we created stories, we estimated our points using a point system that wasn’t tied to hours but instead was relative. We had mini-retrospectives, continuous integration, unit tests and more. For 2004, that was pretty good.

Since then I’ve worked on quite a few other Agile projects and over time, I have come to believe a few of the absolute purest views on Agile aren’t necessarily the best.

When I first signed up for Twitter back in mid-2008 I didn’t really take it seriously. My view was that it was a toy and one that I intended to have a bit of fun with. I didn’t really think that it would turn into what it did. I certainly didn’t think it would be such an amazing source of information, nor did I expect it to give me contact with so many smart and interesting people.

Last week JP and I released our first Open Source project, CorrugatedIron. The release seemed to be fairly well received by those people who gave it a spin. We’ve had some good feedback along the way which we’ll be evaluating, and no doubt those suggestions and comments will be influencing the future of the library.

In the interim, we wanted to get another version out which sorts out two main issues and that changes the perceived “norm” when building applications with CorrugatedIron. Those issues are listed below. We’ve also go the first pass of our Map/Reduce documentation ready.

If you’re not interested in the detail, head on over to the download page to find out the many ways in which you can get access to the release. Otherwise, please read on!

It’s Alive!

It is with great pride that I introduce my first ever Open Source product release: CorrugatedIron! A feature-rich .NET client for the Riak Key-Value store. Together with my partner-in-crime Jeremiah, we’ve put together a driver which exposes a great deal of Riak’s functionality. CorrugatedIron is at v0.1.0, and while it doesn’t support every feature the Riak has to offer, it covers most, if not all, of the most common features that are required to effectively communicate with the system.

At an early age I realised that it’s not always a bad thing to go with your first instinct. I won’t go into the reasons here, nor the way I came to that conclusion. What I will say is that I wish I’d listened to my inner-8-year-old-self when I started down the thread of emails and Tweets you’re about to read.

Suffice is to say that I have learned my lesson!

The thread speaks for itself. Enjoy :)

When I first started blogging back in 2006 the platform of choice at the time was Wordpress, a feature-rich blogging platform build with PHP. Since then the platform has improved substantially and the number of community-driven contributions and plug-ins has increased to a massive number. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using Wordpress for the past 5 years and would recommend it to anyone (I already have!) who is looking for a quality blogging platform.

For me, however, Wordpress was becoming less and less appealing. This isn’t due to a failing in the platform itself, but more because my needs/desires for my blogging engine were changing.