According To Ali

Microservice Architecture is the new trend in the industry. When I thought of building a decisioning engine to work as my personal assistant I decided to design it as a swarm of Microservices. The most compelling selling point about Microservice Architecture which resonated well for me was its ease of maintainability and that's a big factor for a hobby project like this which has a lot of custom logic programmed into it and requires a lot of frequent changes. In theory, Microservice should fit right in. I tried doing it in the Monolithic way and I failed !!. So, will Microservices solve it for me? Let's find out. In this post I will do it in the "Software Engineering" way. Background: Few weeks ago I created a wifi controlled water system that I can control via my Home Assistant (using my phone even if I am on the other side of the planet, like Batman). And this is working great for me. Read about that here: Smart wifi controlled irrigation system . Bu...

As a consultant (I in particular) we love throwing the term best practice whenever and wherever it is convenient. And TBH I am not the only one. Many, if not all, of us (consultants) do this on a perhaps hourly basis. Some possibly enjoy this more than others. There has been times when this has worked for me and times when it worked against me. Really I have mix feeling about it. So, this fine morning I woke up feeling about ranting/venting about it. Caution: This post is a rant and biased based on my opinions (hint hint: This blog site is called "According To Ali"). So let's begin. Let's get our definition part sorted. So here's According to Wiki Wiki says:  " A  best practice  is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things, e.g., a standard way of complying with legal or...

I usually don't watch the Morning Show on channel 7 unless I am in a waiting room or with my girlfriend, in both cases changing the channel is beyond my reach. This morning I was in the airport waiting for my flight and as usual the morning show was on TV in the waiting room. I came across this weird interesting topic, as the title of the news was "Beauty and a Geek -- Victoria's secret model and codes in spare time". Similar subheadings kept rolling in at the bottom of the screen as the interview went on. I will quote few of those "part time coder", "she codes in her spare time", "beauty with brain ( well this one wasn't a heading but something similar that the reporter said )". Seriously WTF !! Is it only me or everyone can spot why I am ranting about this ? I will point it out just in case: 1. Using words/terms like "coder".. is so wrong . This is 2014 .. Seriously who says words like that? And I'm unaware...