Paul Grenyer

There hasn’t been anything from Find My Tea HQ for a while. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes improving the existing infrastructure and fixing bugs in the app, not least of which, the lack of functioning maps on iPhone. The good news is the maps are back and there’s a new version of the app to download for iPhone users! Early next year we hope to release a feature which will let users add new locations for other users to search for. Stick with us, we really appreciate your support so far. Please connect with us on social media in the meantime: Website: http://findmytea.co.uk/ (including links to the apps) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Findmytea-113424607013669 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/findmytea Twitter: https://twitter.com/FindMyTea

Bone Silence by Alastair Reynolds My rating: 5 of 5 stars Alistair Reynolds is still by far my favorite author and he has continued his form, which rebooted with Revenger , in Bone Silence. A friend once said to me that Alistair Reynolds struggles to know how to write an ending and, disappointingly, I think this is still true with Bone Silence. This trilogy has the constant unanswered questions which drew me into and kept me hooked on the Revelation Space stories. There is a kind of answer at the end and a bit of a twist which, if I’m honest, left me underwhelmed. The answer lacks detail and explanation of the reasons and then the Ness sisters ride off into the sunset and Reynolds announces that he’s done with the pair. That aside I loved Bone Silence and the entire trilogy. Each book is different and describes different aspects of the universe in which it is set. The characters are diverse and interesting and the story wide, far reaching and mostly unpredictable. The sisters' r...

Developing software is hard and all good developers are lazy. This is one of the reasons we have tools which automate practices like continuous integration, static analysis and measuring test coverage. The practices help us to measure quality and find problems with code early. When you measure something you can make it better. Automation makes it easy to perform the practices and means that lazy developers are likely to perform them more often, especially if they’re automatically performed every time the developer checks code in. This is old news. These practices have been around for more than twenty years. They have become industry standards and not using them is, quite rightly, frowned upon. What is relatively new is the introduction of cloud based services such as BitBucket Pipelines , CircleCI and SonarCloud which allow you to set up these practices in minutes, however with this flexibility and efficiency comes a cost. Why While BitBucket Pipelines, CircleCI and SonarCloud have fre...

Run Jenkins in Docker with Docker Compose Why use Jenkins I hear you ask? Well, for me the answers are simple: familiarity and the availability of an existing tested and officially supported Docker image. I have been using Jenkins for as long as I can remember.  The official image is here: https://hub.docker.com/r/jenkins/jenkins After getting Jenkins up and running in the container we’ll look at creating a ‘Pipeline’ with the Docker Pipeline plugin. Jenkins supports lots of different ‘Items’, which used to be called ‘Jobs’, but Docker can be used to encapsulate build and test environments as well. In fact this is what BitBucket Pipelines and CircleCI also do. To run Jenkins Pipeline we need a Jenkins installation with Docker installed. The easiest way to do this is to use the existing Jenkins Docker image from Docker Hub. Open a new command prompt and create a new directory for the development pipeline configuration and a sub directory called Jenkins with the following Dockerfi...

Make no mistake, I LOVE DigitalOcean ! It’s simple to use and reasonably priced, especially compared to some of its better known competitors. They even respond quickly to queries on Twitter! A couple of days ago I received an email from DigitalOcean inviting me to try out their new Beta 2 for App Platform (DigitalOcean’s PaaS product) which they described as follows: “It handles common infrastructure-related tasks like provisioning and managing servers, databases, operating systems, application runtimes, and other dependencies. This means you can go from code to production in just minutes. We support Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, and static sites right out of the box. If you have apps in other languages, simply create a Dockerfile and App Platform will do the rest. You can deploy apps directly from your Github repos and scale them (vertically and horizontally) if needed.….” I’m also a fan of Heroku for its ease of application deployment and, with the exception of a few AWS services,...

I've had much anticipation for this release and I wasn't disappointed. While it lacks the epic nature of Severn Seals and New Religion until the final (13 minute!) track, it's packed full of solid power metal songs. Unlike most albums, I found it instantly enjoyable on first listen. Other than the lack of epicness, my only complaint would be it's rather short. I'm fully expecting this to become one of my favourite albums of 2020. Metal Commando

Why When Naked Element was still a thing, we used DigitalOcean almost exclusively for our client’s hosting. For the sorts of projects we were doing it was the most straightforward and cost effective solution. DigitalOcean provided managed databases, but there was no facility to automatically back them up. This led us to develop a Python based program which was triggered once a day to perform the backup, push it to AWS S3 and send a confirmation or failure email. We used Python due to familiarity, ease of use and low installation dependencies. I’ll demonstrate this later on in the Dockerfile. S3 was used for storage as DigitalOcean did not have their equivalent, ‘Spaces’, available in their UK data centre. The closest is in Amsterdam, but our clients preferred to have their data in the UK.  Fast forward to May 2020 and I’m working on a personal project which uses a PostgreSQL database. I tried to use a combination of AWS and Terraform  for the project’s infrastru...

We'll use TDD to create a Terraform module which builds a Heroku app and deploys a simple React application. If you'd like to follow along, you'll need the following prerequisites Terraform installed Go 1.14 installed Heroku account - HEROKU_API_KEY added to environment variables. Git installed BitBucket account This meetup will be via Zoom:- https://zoom.us/j/902141920 Please RSVP here:  https://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/269640463/

Something my first proper girlfriend said to me has stuck with me my entire life as I disagree with it (mostly).  She said that the best way to discover a new band was to see them live first. The reason I disagree is because I get most pleasure from knowing the music I am listening to live - most of the time. I’m a member of the Bloodstock Rock Society and their Facebook page is often a place of band discussion. Lots of people there were saying how good Insomnium are, but they didn’t do a great deal for me when I listened to them on Spotify. Then it was early 2020, I hadn’t been to a gig since Shakespears Sister in November, I fancied a night out and Insomnium were playing in Norwich. So I took a chance…. From the off they were great live and I really enjoyed it. I came to the conclusion that I must like some of their older stuff as it was the new album which hadn’t done much for me. There were lots of things I like, like widdly guitars, metal riffs and blast beats, but wh...