Sometimes it’s not easy to find the incriminating message in a failed Jenkins job console output. I have found the Log Parser Plugin to be quite helpful–not only to highlight and link to error messages, but any messages you’d like. You can configure it to match any regular expression for one of three levels of … Continue reading Jenkins Log Parsing
I recently did a quick evaluation of React Native for development of educational software here at Amplify. The desire was to find a platform where development could be done on iOS, Android and Web with maximum reuse, so a student or teacher could use the software in class on a desktop, as well as at home on … Continue reading React Native for iOS, Android and Web
In my last post, I suggested turning your riskiest assumptions into hypotheses that you can test. But how do you tease out the assumptions you are making? It’s a tricky question. We make a great number of assumptions every moment we are alive, on topics ranging from physical laws to the likely behavior of others … Continue reading Look Behind the Why
Me: I think the big bites can burn your mouth more than small bites, because there are more molecules–those little balls bouncing around–that can bump into your mouth and warm it up than there would be in a smaller bite. At least, that’s my guess. My young daughter: That’s your hippopotamus? Me: Yes. That’s my hippopotamus. In … Continue reading What’s the Hippopotamus?
Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup advocates rigor in the learning we do while building products or services. While calling learning the startup’s “most vital function”, he rightly warns about falling back on learning as an excuse for failure after the fact. He also calls out the danger of unfocused experimentation: “if the plan is to see … Continue reading The Lean Grownup
Storytelling is a cornerstone of our strategy for connecting with hard-to-reach students in the math classroom. With respect to design, one of our goals is to craft a product that both students and teachers feel is age-appropriate. Since our last playtesting session, we have continued to study and define how certain design elements affect the … Continue reading Design testing: Balancing detail and age appropriateness
Many years ago in a relational database world, increasing the scalability and performance of a software system was fairly simple Modify your application/SQL to run more efficiently – Performance tuning. Increase your hardware resources. Scaling up means bigger machines, more processors, disk storage and memory. This gets expensive and there are some real limits on how … Continue reading CAP Theorem – Explained
The cathedral reference in Eric Raymond’s essay refers to software “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation”. When you are running a group of teams as an open source ecosystem, you want your organization to look like a cathedral, but run like a bazaar.
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