Programming Topics Archives

It’s Bugging Me – Debugging in Unknown Languages

By Iron | March 28, 2016 |

I’ll admit it, for one reason or another, I never really learned .NET. I think it just wasn’t very popular when I started my career and none of the places I’ve worked at have needed it. It somehow never crept into my list of languages to learn, so here I am. For the record (and…

Is Open Source Eating The World?

By Iron | January 14, 2016 |

Thanks to Dominic Alves for the base image! CC BY 2.0 The phrase, “Software is eating the world,” first showed up in 2011. In 2015, open source took its rightful seat at the table. “If the theory pervades deeper – and software does eat the world – then surely open source software will swallow it,…

The E.T. in ETL

By Iron | January 9, 2016 |

Thanks to JD Hancock for the base image! CC BY 2.0 Anyone who’s ever done ETL knows it can get seriously funky. When I first started working on ETL, I was parsing data for a real estate company. Every once in awhile roofing data would appear in the pool field. “Shingles” isn’t a compelling feature…

Best practices for ElePHPants coding in Go

By Iron | November 30, 2015 |

Thanks to Guido da Rozza for the base image CC BY 2.0 I’ve often coded in PHP. Recently, I realized that when I code in Go, it’s easier to spot my PHPisms. After weeks of cleaning them up, it only takes a day to fry my brain with them again. I’m sure I’m not the…

Helpful hints: Pre-commit

By Iron | October 17, 2015 |

I had a lot of fun sharing pre-commit with everyone earlier this week. In case you missed it, here’s a link. As a follow up, I whipped together a quick How-To video. In it, you’ll follow along as I add a pre-commit hook to a brand new Node.js project. Init a git repo locally, and you can the same…

Polyglot microservices need pre-commit + git

By Iron | October 14, 2015 |

Microservices are great! Or, at least that’s what the internet keeps telling me. There are a lot of upsides, but there are more than a few challenges too. For example, microservices are a polyglot’s dream. Have a Rails app and a use case where Ruby seems a bit too slow? No problem, microservices and…

Erin McKean on Master/slave vs Primary/replica

By Iron | September 21, 2015 |

Thanks to Vijayasarathi R. for the base image! CC BY 2.0 A couple months ago Drupal and Django switched from master/slave to new terminology. The goal was to adopt a term that’s more inclusive. When that happened, a big discussion kicked off around most of the Tech water coolers. With inclusiveness as a hot topic…

E is for Event: A Fresh Take on ETL

By Iron | September 15, 2015 |

As a follow up to my previous post, The Workloads of the Internet of Things, I wanted to walk through a real world example that fully captures the principles of event-driven computing put forth. Let’s set the stage first… imagine we operate a windmill farm and want to continually track optimal weather conditions to maximize…

When and Why for Microservices

By Iron | September 11, 2015 |

Thanks to Thomas Leuthard for the base image CC BY 2.0 Microservices are difficult. Don’t believe me? Let’s read a quote from Chris Richardson, the founder of CloudFoundry: When developing the first version of an application, you often do not have the problems that [the microservices] approach solves. Moreover, using an elaborate, distributed architecture will…

Legible + efficient SQL with CTEs

By Iron | September 4, 2015 |

Thanks to Jonny Hughes for the base image! Howdy! I’m Paul, and I’m one of the newer faces here at iron.io. My plan is to blog, champion local meetups, and empower developers. That last one is a whiz-bang business term for “help folks learn how to do dead-simple job processing.” Today, I’ll blog about an…