Paul Grenyer

A Storm of Swords, Part 2: Blood and Gold (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) by George R.R. Martin ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0007447855 At least George R. R. Martin is consistent. I didn’t really enjoy the second part of this book any more than the first. The Red Wedding was very disappointing and there was far too much about choosing a new commander on The Wall. I was pleased Lysa got pushed through the moon door at the end though! Of course I’m going to continue with the final, so far, two books. I can’t not finish it.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance   by  Robert Pirsig ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099786405 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an interesting book, which I read after a recommendation. The reader’s guide at the end (Kindle edition), which I’d recommend reading first, explains that the book is really three stories: A motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California A philosophical meditation on the concept of quality A story of a man persuaded by the ghost of his former self I only really enjoyed the motorcycle trip part. The discussion on quality was long, a bit rambly and convoluted. There was just too much of it. Other than the enjoyable description of the motorcycle journey, this part of the book has some interesting insights into relationships, interaction between people and what motivates people’s behaviour.

Prelude To Foundation Asaac Asimov ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008117481 Although, as a child and teenager, I’ve heard an abridged audiobook many times and read Prelude to Foundation the first time more than two decades ago, I loved it more than I can describe and more than any other book I have read for a long time. It’s a good story, well told. While probably not true Space Opera, it has a wide scope. It has all the things I like: Spaceships, otherworlds, science and even some action. I also realised for the first time that Hari Seldon is both unpleasant and sexist. Maybe this is because I am viewing a book from the mid eighties through eyes from the 2020s. Maybe this was Asimov’s intention. Maybe it’s how Asimov was. Perhaps reading the other Foundation and Robot novels will help my understanding.

Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey ISBN: 978-1841499918 I was really keen to read this after Leviathan Wakes was so good and after enjoying the TV series so much. Of course there was the pull of the introduction of Chrisjen Avasarala as well, and she really did not disappoint. She was amazing. The majority of the book was a bit ploddy, especially compared to the first, but the exciting bits were super exciting. The events which resolved the climax and sustained one of the main characters were somewhat contrived and convenient, but I could live with that. In this book, the TV series diverged even more. This disappoints me, because the story and events in the book are so much better than what they changed or invented for TV. I guess I have more of this to come moving on to book 3.

By Alistair Reynolds ASIN: B0C99899GL Take two of my favourite things and my favourite author and what do you get? Formula 1 in space with cyborgs, and who doesn’t love a Sisters of Mercy Reference? From a Formula 1 perspective, there’s so much there. Reynolds explains how, in this universe, there are different races on different bodies in the solar system. He alludes to some of the sports biggest questions from how much technology is used, to the role sponsors and money play to some of the politics around which teams are favoured and what benefits they may get to stay in the sport. He explores a bigger question through the drivers as well. This is a short story, so I read it in two sittings. There definitely could be a larger novel here, but I suspect there won’t be. If you’ve an hour or two to spare, give Detonation Boulevard (which I can only hear in my head in Andrew Edritch’s voice) a read!

By Frank Herbert ISBN:  ‎ 978-1473233805 I’ve seen lots of people rave about God Emperor of Dune, the first of the second Dune trilogy, which is set several thousand years after the events of Children of Dune. As far as I’m concerned, it’s ok. It consists mostly of the God Emperor, Leto II, whose body is transitioning into a wormlike state with a protruding, cowelled face and arms, giving various other characters his thoughts and feelings on existence and how wonderful and godlike he is. Not much actually happens in the book, few conclusions are drawn and the ending kinda peters out.  

Separation of Concerns is a key principle in software engineering. When we used to deploy applications to physical hardware, the two separate concerns of infrastructure and software would often become blurred as an application would often need to tailor to particular hardware, or more likely the operating system running on that  hardware. In the modern world of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), where everything is software (almost), it’s potentially even more difficult to separate the concerns of infrastructure and software. Organisations often have two teams. A platform team to look after the infrastructure and a development team to develop the software. Once the infrastructure is created and the software is written there is an overlap between the teams which is deployment. This is where the teams must work together. Consider AWS Lambdas. There are two separate components which are often considered as a whole, the Lambda itself within the AWS infrastructure and the code which runs wit...

Storm of Swords: Part 1 Steel and Snow George R Martin ISBN: 9780007447848 I didn’t like the previous book, A Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords isn’t a great deal better, but it is better.   I really enjoyed the multiple threads and, of course, learning more about the characters we all know from the TV series. There are hints about the Red Wedding and I was expecting it to be in the final part of the book, but the last 5% turned out to be appendices this time. Perhaps it’s at the start of the second part. I’ll get to it.

A nonofficial, JavaScript, feature complete, client library for sending transactional emails via Bloomreach . The aim of the bloomreach-transactional-email package is to get you going with the Bloomreach Transactional Email API as quickly as possible. The sendEmail function takes the minimum number of required parameters to send an email. Other parameters are optional. Full details of all the options can be found in the Bloomreach Transactional Email API documentation . bloomreach-transactional-email  uses axios , as a peer dependency, to make HTTP calls. Install npm i -save bloomreach-transactional-email Basic Examples If you have Customer IDs and a default email integration with a sender name and address setup in Bloomreach then you can use the minimum configuration to send an email by specifying a HTML body and a subject: import { sendEmail } from 'bloomreach-transactional-email'; const auth = {     username: '...',    // Your APIKeyID   ...

by James S. A. Corey ISBN-13: 978-0316333429   I was apprehensive about reading Leviathan Wakes as a friend had suggested it was boring compared to the TV series, which I loved. It wasn’t! The Protomolecule is brown goo, rather than bright glittery stuff, but that really didn’t matter. Chrisjen Avasarala, one of my favourite characters from the TV series, and the earth government don’t feature at all. It’ll be interesting to see if she appears later in the series. Some of the other bits invented for TV I didn’t feel were necessary. The main characters were mostly the same and I felt like I already knew them. I struggle to think of Leviathan Wakes as a space opera. There are only really two threads and the scope isn’t particularly broad. However, there is loads of potential for the future books and I’m really looking forward to them.

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Sleepover Alistair Reynolds ASIN: ‎ B0097AXWUY I often think that Alastair Reynolds must have encountered some truly unpleasant people in his life, as he creates such nasty characters so well. Sleepover starts with Gaunt awakened from a long sleep, but soon the backstory of why those who awoke him are so unpleasant unfolds. Gaunt awakes to a dystopian future quite unlike any other I’ve read about or imagined and this is where the story really starts to get interesting. It was clear from the outset that this story was just the beginnings or a larger work, which was pieced together from notes, and may or may not be developed into a longer novel. I hope it does.

The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien ISBN: 978-0007523221 I read the Lord of the Rings when I was about 8, having loved the BBC radio play starring Michael Hordern as Gandalf. Of course I wanted to read the Silmarillion too, but was always told it was hard going, which put me off. Then I tried it in my early 20s and didn’t get past the first few pages. Today, at (nearly) 46 I finished it. The Silmarillion is hard going and, for the most part, unpleasant to read. It’s mostly the language used and that it reads more like a technical history than a story. It’s quite repetitive with battle after battle and no real progress for good or evil.  There are so many different names and places and this makes it difficult to follow. It gets better around Beren and Lúthien.  Where it really gets interesting, and more enjoyable, is when it reaches the Third Age and there’s more about the rings of power and the characters I’m more familiar with from the Lord of the Rings....

The New One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson  I rarely read a book more than once (unless it’s set in Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space Universe), but this is the third time I’ve read the New One Minute Manager, and It’s not just because it’s a quick and easy book to read, with clear, concise digestible advice. Many years ago, when I ran my own business, I was working with the conflicting practice of asking my employees to assume that everything was ok unless I said otherwise, and the desire for them to be happy in their work. This meant that most of the time feedback was sparse and, when it did come, it was predominantly negative - although I didn’t operate a blame culture. The New One Minute manager has quite a different approach. Now that I’m leading a team again, I read it through to remind myself of the approach. I’m currently experimenting with the One Minute Goals in a software engineering context. I use something similar to the One Minute Praisings ...

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alistair Reynolds ISBN: ‎ 978-0575083134 Diamond Dogs I don’t get full satisfaction from stories that leave unanswered questions, unless those questions get answered in future stories. I don’t like that I don’t know why the Spire can levitate. I don’t like that I don’t know where the Spire came from, who built it or what it was for. I don’t like it that I don’t know if Richard and/or Childe completed all the puzzles and reached the top.  I don’t like that I don’t know what was at the top and I don’t like the implication that it might be the weapon used to kill Pattern Jugglers, because that asks even more unanswered questions. I loved the story so much more on second reading and I think that’s because I was so much more familiar with the Revelation Space universe, specifically the eighty, and the other stories within it this time. No longer do I feel it was for people who really enj...

The Great Dune Trilogy Frank Herbert ISBN-13: 0575070706 I remember distinctly reading Dune in 1992 after seeing the 1980s film. In fact I can still picture myself lying on a bed in a holiday cottage in a small French village near Carcassonne reading the book. I went on to read Dune Messiah, but couldn’t get into Children of Dune. I tried it again several years later, but still couldn’t get into it. Dune has been on my list to reread for a while. When searching for Dune in the Amazon Kindle store the trilogy came up as one book, so I decided to read all three straight through and I’m glad I did! There’s no getting away from the fact that Dune is a great story. I discovered recently that it’s two stories glued together and it shows. The first half of the book has lots of details and then there appears to be a large gap in the story, which at least one of the films attempted to fill, and then you get the end of the story. I don’t really like the way Frank Herbert explains what’s going to...

So You Are Uncomfortable with Duplicate Data?  If, like me, you’ve spent a reasonable amount of your career working with relational databases,  where data is rationalised to avoid duplication, the idea of duplicating data across microservices is probably anathema to you. Even if you’ve worked with a noSql database like MongoDB, where data is often duplicated across the documents, you probably still struggle with the idea of a service keeping a copy of data owned by another service. Discomfort with duplication doesn’t need to come from databases. The Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle of software engineering states that "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system". Even the process of Test Driven Development (TDD) includes a step for refactoring to remove duplication as part of the cycle. As software developers we are programmed to detest duplication in all its forms. It’s ok, I have felt your pain and as soon ...