Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

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Power of the server in your client
git•

Power of the server in your client

The previous generation of Version Control Systems (VCS), like Subversion, have a traditional client-server model. All the functionality relating to version control resides on the server. The client i.e. your local development machine, has access to just a single snapshot of the codebase; nothing can be done with respect to versioning without access to the VCS server. [](/images/originals/traditional-VCS.png) Git, however, is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) - there is no server-client relationship because every machine that has git installed is itself a server. What was previously your dumb client becomes a fully fledged server. Any ability your company repo...

2 min readRead more →
git•

For those not yet using git

Whether you're yet to use the world's favourite new version control system in earnest or not, be under no illusions - it is the future, git has won. But then you already knew that. This series of blog posts are for those who haven't learned git possibly for one of the following reasons: - You find the quick introductions don't adequately explain the complex concepts of git - You find the "grok the man pages" approach to learning convoluted and impenetrable - You find brick walls when arguing why your team should adopt git If any of those sound familiar,...

3 min readRead more →
Yo dawg, I heard you like functions
follies•

Yo dawg, I heard you like functions

It's hopefully old news to you all but the free lunch is over (NB this article is 10 years old). TL;DR – as we come up against the physical limits of how small transistors can be future computation gains will come from more processors, not faster processors. We can already see this looking at the number of cores we have available in development standard laptops. Writing code that can distribute its workload across multiple cores will only become more important as time goes on. As we move more and more services to AWS ensuring we get the most value for...

9 min readRead more →
A git workflow for beginners
follies•

A git workflow for beginners

The web is awash with introductions and guides to using git. There's this visual guide here, that interactive tutorial there, reams of documentation, and of course all kinds of troubleshooting help. But if you're coming from a traditional Version Control System (SVN, Perforce, Clearcase etc.) the main barrier to using git is not answering the question, "How to I checkout and commit code changes?", but rather, "How do I use all these complex features to develop software?" This guide is a complementary resource to the others, providing a working template of how you should use git in order to deliver...

11 min readRead more →
coding•

Converting XML to JSON

XML and JSON are the two most common generic standards for passing representation state information in web APIs. So when I recently needed to convert XML to JSON, I didn't even think about the structure of XML, I simply looked for a library to do it. "Why isn't there a library to do this?" I thought. Quite simply, because you cannot express XML as JSON and vice versa. There are too many grey areas where a choice needs to be made about how the conversion should be done. A lack of bijective one-to-one mapping means that no-one will create a...

4 min readRead more →