Paul Grenyer

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 ...