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.

For some reason Google Reader has failed to update and include my latest Web Development in Erlang post. This is rather odd as every other RSS reader I have tested (including the one built-in to MS Outlook) has managed to parse and handle the post just fine. I have attempted to get in touch with the GReader team but I haven’t had any luck so far in getting them to respond.

Those of you who are using Google Reader and are interested in this post, please point your browser in this direction.

Apologies for the issue.

For those of you who are new to the series, you may want to check out Part 1 and Part 2 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!

This post builds on the previous two, but not without a few little modifications. If you’re interested in following along step by step with your own version of the code running, then get yourself a copy of this changeset before doing so.

In this post we’re going to cover:

1. A slight refactor of code structure to support the “standard” approach to building applications in Erlang using OTP.
2. Building a small set of modules to talk to Riak.
3. Creation of some JSON helper functions for reading and writing data.
4. Calling all the way from the Webmachine front-end to Riak to extract data and display it in a browser using ErlyDTL templates.

There are quite a few code snippets in this post as well as output from script executions and bash sessions. To avoid confusion, all file listings reference the path to the file that is being modified relative to the root of the project folder.

Be warned, this is a long post :) Get yourself a shmoke und a pancake, a glass of your favourite beverage and put some relaxing music on (instrumental is best).

Are you ready? OK, here we go …

In the last few days I’ve been working on resolving issues in a production system which runs on ASP.NET MVC 2. Most of the issues were actually really easy to resolve and the team of developers were able to fix them and deploy to production without too many problems.

Unfortunately, as always, there was one problem in particular that had us scratching our heads and was causing some of us to lose sleep. All over the Internet there were posts of people describing similar symptoms yet none of them revealed a solid answer.

The purpose of this post is to document the issue and the resolution in it’s entirety. It’s in story form rather than reference form because that’s how I felt like writing it :)