Weekly Roundup (Week 34, 2016)
For a while, I’ve wanted to share what I get up to in a given week. What podcasts have I been listening to? What articles have I been…
For a while, I’ve wanted to share what I get up to in a given week. What podcasts have I been listening to? What articles have I been reading?
Starting with this post, I’ll be sharing all of those things, on a weekly basis, helping others to discover interesting content and find out what I’m actually spending my time on!
Thoughts This Week
I’m coming to the end of a contract I’ve been working on for the past couple of months and so have been thinking about where the next piece of work is going to come from.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have gained experience across many different industries, from transport, to audio, to Oil & Gas. I’ve used various technologies, from Java to develop native Android apps, to C# for ASP.NET MVC backends, to React for an embeddable website widget. While this has been great, it puts me in a somewhat awkward position when trying to sell that experience.
I often get caught up in the fact that I don’t have 5 years experience in one particular area. I often find it difficult to backup my claims that I’m a good JavaScript/C# developer.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make that easier. How to get some confidence about what I’m selling. In the end, I felt that it came down to having some evidence. Having something I could point to and say, “take a look at that, that’s why I’m a good JavaScript developer”.
So, this week, I came up with a list of projects that I will be focussing on. Each of them will be open-sourced and will be accompanied by blog posts about their design and any other interesting points. One of those projects is almost ready and I’ll hopefully be able to say more about it next week!
Podcast Picks
Bootstrapped Web | For Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping Web Startups | Interviews & Business Case…
When you’re thinking of creating a new SAAS product, pricing can be a tricky thing to get right. Too low and development will be slow due to lack of capital, too high and potential customers may not see it as worth it for the potential value.
The hosts of Bootstrapped Web, along with a guest, talk about their experience with trying to price SAAS products.
Nugget is an interesting concept — charge people for receiving startup ideas in their inbox, every day. Each idea has come from a real potential customer and includes some basic validation and suggestions for next steps (i.e. potential competitors that you should look at).
In this episode, the hosts of Startups for the Rest of Us are joined by the creator of Nugget to discuss where the concept came from, how they released it and how they settled on pricing for it.
Article Picks
This article was recommended during this month’s TechMeetup Glasgow talk on microservices, by Kevin McDermott.
The author talks about the need to implement hard operational limits when designing distributed systems. Allowing services to reject data (back-pressure) or drop data (load-shedding) when they reach those limits pushes the issue back to the data source, allowing the data source to deal with the issue appropriately (i.e. retry).
Without these limits, the sources of data believe that everything is okay, the amount of in-flight data increases until it causes issues in some other area, which is then difficult to track back to the service that was at capacity and so caused the issue.
The author talks about the general approaches many people suggest to solving these problems and why they are just displacing the issues rather than solving them.
That’s it for this week’s roundup! Got a problem you think I could help solve? Let’s grab a coffee.
