Steve Good

Implementing a cache, even a basic one, used to require lots of architectural discussion, meetings, evaluations, and a significant amount of development time. With Spring Boot, those days are far behind us! With a small amount of configuration, dependency management, and a few annotations any developer can have caching set up in their application in a few minutes. Generating a new application Using either the Spring Boot CLI or the Spring Initializr, create a new application using the following (unless specified, use the defaults): »

Writing plugins for Atlassian products is pretty straight forward (once you get passed the insanely out-of-date documentation). But using Java can be overly verbose and less flexible than some other more modern languages. There are examples of writing plugins using Scala and JRuby out there but documentation for using Groovy seems to be a bit of a black hole. Since Groovy is my JVM language of choice, I have decided to document the process and give a simple example. »

Ghost + Pivotal CF = <3 Last year I moved my blog to Ghost and hosted it in Pivotal CF. This has been great so far but I’m starting to get twitchy about paying for an application to be running in PCF when I rarely update anything. This is my response to that concern. GitHub Pages There are a number of advantages to using GitHub Pages over a blogging application but for the most part I really like the price. »

I get asked all the time on my stream which language someone should learn when they first get started. I typically start by asking what the end goal is. Want to build games? Websites? Desktop applications? The answer to that question will lead new developers in totally different directions. I recently found a pretty good infographic to help young developers choose a language that best suites their goals. »

For the last two years I have been a full time contractor at KaiNexus serving as their Principal Architect. During this that time I made new friends and had the opportunity to work on a project that could leave a great positive mark on the world. However, as with all things, this chapter has come to a close. Starting this month I will be transitioning from KaiNexus to Cisco Systems. »

Recently, the need arose for me to monitor a URL so that notifications could be sent out if the site was suddenly unavailable. Later on down the road this will need to evolve into a more proactive system rather than reactive but for now I am just focusing on site down notifications. To start, I set some minimal requirements for myself. Needs to be easy to write, can’t take more than an hour to build Needs to be easy to maintain, problems should be easy to find and fix Needs to be able to send SMS messages in case of outages Needs to be able to run standalone or on a server under cron When looking at the requirements I had to think about what kind of scripting environment would be best served for the task. »

KaiNexus, the company where I am the Principal Architect, has just released our latest “Explainer” video. The new video includes 3 use cases and a bunch of screen grabs from the actual software. This video is quite exciting as I think it really shows what kinds of problems our software solves. Check it out! »

Sometimes it is so easy to ignore the things around us that we see on a daily basis. The subject of this photo was no exception. This is a walkway at the office complex where I work 5 days a week and I never once thought to bring my camera and shoot it. A few days ago I decided to change that. Here are the results. SmugMug Grails Plugin Update A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was building a Grails plugin that aimed to wrap the SmugMug API. »

There is a really interesting hallway at UT Southwestern Medical Center that just screamed “spooky” at me. I wanted to grab my camera and shoot some of the interesting angles and lines but I was a bit worried about offending patients and staff by walking around the hotel with camera and tripod in hand. As an alternative, I used my iPhone and captured the following video. I processed it a little bit in iMovie. »

This is the finished product of the image below. It was taken in downtown Fort Worth on my last photowalk research day. I was fascinated by the combination of glass, metal and concrete and the lines they formed. Normally, this is filled with flowing water but I got there just shortly after they turned everything off. I really dig the way everything looks even without the water. Brackets I saw a post on Google+ where someone posted a collage with the brackets used to make up one of their HDRs. »