Month: May 2011

Recently I’ve been doing a bit of work with queues, in part with RabbitMQ. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) network connections where I am have had a tendency to be unreliable.  That’s a story for the pub; but, needless to say we needed our clients of RabbitMQ to be robust in light of disconnections.  Fortunately, RabbitMQ has ways of dealing with this. A bit about queues Queues are a two way communication mechanism.  You can enqueue messages and dequeue messages.  In a distributed system you often have a local queue that you asynchronously deal with when … Continue reading Robustness with RabbitMQ in .NET

There’s lots of organizations and company’s that offer "certification"–either on their own products/processes or someone else’s.  They’ll all try to tell you the virtues of their certification.  But, despite their claims, certification isn’t a panacea.  Let’s look at some caveats of certification. The biggest area I’ve seen is what "certification" means.  "Certified" as what, or able to do what?  Really, certification only certifies that the person can and has taken an exam.  Let’s look at software development for a moment.  I’m never going to hire someone whose sole purpose will be to take that exam.  There’s the possibility that they … Continue reading Certification Caveats

I was having a  conversation with a client recently and the topic of “11th hour” came up.  He seemed to think it wasn’t possible to deliver a software project without some sort of “11th hour” panic.  I disagreed I disagree because I’ve done it on small and large projects.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s very easy to lose sight of things and easily get a project into a state where “11th hour” panic is inevitable.  But, it’s not something that can’t be avoided. One of the problems with software projects, it seems, (and with other projects, I suppose) is losing … Continue reading Criteria for Success