Consul is a service networking tool and a distributed service mesh solution developed by HashiCorp. It is designed to simplify the process of service discovery, configuration, and segmentation in modern, dynamic, and cloud-native environments.

As part of my Journey into discovering more about Nomad I also wanted to learn more about Consul.

Prerequisites

Install Go: apt install golang

Install Make: apt install make

Install Consul

Close the repo.

git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/consul.git
cd consul

Run the Make command make dev

I’ve recently took on a new role as Technical Lead on an Integration Team within a large organisation. I was asked by a semi-technical friend what the team’s products were. I covered them, and recieved the response… “What is a API Gateway?”. So here’s a quick blog post for future reference.

An API gateway is the software layer that sits between an API client and an API server. It acts as a proxy, routing requests from the client to the server and returning responses back to the client.

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets you run your code without provisioning or managing servers. Java is one of the supported programming languages for AWS Lambda, which makes it a great choice for many applications. However, to get the best performance from your Java-based AWS Lambda functions, you’ll need to follow a few best practices. In this blog post, I’ll go over some of the most important optimisation techniques for Java on AWS Lambda.

Before I start, disabling tests as part of your build pipeline is bad - I don’t recommend it. However, in this scenario, sam builds, especially when running sam sync --watch can take a bit of time, and the feedback loop (write some code, and quickly see it running) can be several minutes, rather than seconds (which you would normally see when running unit tests etc).

So, when running sam sync --watch you may want to disable running of unit/integration tests to make things faster. I’d recommend ensuring unit tests and integration tests are ran somewhere else in your build pipeline.

This is a quick guide on installing GraalVM on your M1 Mac - this guide also works for x86_64 Macs also.

This will install GraalVM for Java11 - different Java versions are available here: https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases

Install GraalVM using Homebrew

brew install --cask graalvm/tap/graalvm-ce-java11

export JAVA_HOME=$HOME/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/graalvm-ce-java11-22.0.0.2/Contents/Home

Give GraalVM permission to run

xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/graalvm-ce-java11-22.0.0.2

Install using sdkman

SDKMAN is a brilliant tool, you can install it here: https://sdkman.io/install

sdk install java 22.0.0.2.r17-grl

export JAVA_HOME=$HOME/.sdkman/candidates/java/22.0.0.2.r17-grl

Install native-image plugin

Firstly update your path

Brew version:

Install Rosetta 2

/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

Install Homebrew under Rosetta 2 (/usr/local/Homebrew)

arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Tap Cloudfoundry

arch -x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew tap cloudfoundry/tap

Install CloudFoundry

arch -x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew install cf-cli@7

While being a Lead/Senior Developer on several agile development teams, I’ve seen the ups and downs of pair programming. I’ve tried to introduce pairing into new teams with different levels of success - so I thought I’d write down some of the experiences I’ve had - and the potential was of working that can make pair programming less painful.

In August 2020 I wrote an article about Some thoughts on pairing during software development. Where I talked about :

You may have cloned a project and tried running ’npm install’ only to find the following error message:

error Maximum call stack size exceeded

There’s multiple ways I’ve found to fix this:

The Safe ways:

Force clear the NPM cache:

npm cache clean --force
npm install

Rebuild:

npm rebuild
npm install

Remove node_modules:

rm -r node_modules
npm install

The Nuclear way:

rm package-lock.json
rm -r node_modules
npm install

As always, I hope this fixes your problem!

Over the past few months, I’ve been pairing (pair programming) with other Software Engineers when working on stories during our sprints. It’s been fun, and the first time in a while I’ve enjoyed and felt rewarded while ‘pairing’. While I’m sitting in the sun, on a beach in Wales enjoying our holiday with my family, I look back and consider it hasn’t all been plain sailing…

My first exposure to pair programming came as I was working on a team that was writing API’s for some of our business services. It was a relatively new formed team with a range of mid to junior level Software Engineers, a Business Analyst, a Product Owner, a QA tester and a Scrum Master.

I came across a money-saving Challenge called the ‘1p Challenge’. Basically you save an amount of money based on the day number in the year.

For example, on January the 1st, you would save 1p. Towards the end of the year, say day 365, you would save £3.65

As you can imagine, this starts saving small but eventually ramps up so you will save around £667 over the year.

The problem is, it’s incredibly hard to manage yourself. Finding the time or remembering to transfer funds into another account every day is a challenge. So, like most things in my life, I decided to automate it.