Thrashing Code Twitch Schedule September 19th-October 2nd

I’ve got everything queued back up with some extra Thrashing Code Sessions and will have some on the rails travel streams. Here’s what the schedule looks like so far.

Today at 3pm PST (UPDATED: Sep 19th 2018)

thrashing-code-terraformUPDATED: Video available https://youtu.be/NmlzGKUnln4

I’m going to get back into the roll of things this session after the travels last week. In this session I’m aiming to do several things:

  1. Complete next steps toward getting a DataStax Enterprise Apache Cassandra cluster up and running via Terraform in Google Cloud Platform. My estimate is I’ll get to the point that I’ll have three instances that launch and will automate the installation of Cassandra on the three instances. Later I’ll aim to expand this, but for now I’m just going to deploy 3 nodes and then take it from there. Another future option is to bake the installation into a Packer deployed image and use it for the Terraform execution. Tune in to find out the steps and what I decide to go with.
  2. I’m going to pull up the InteroperabilityBlackBox and start to flesh out some objects for our model. The idea, is based around something I stumbled into last week during travels, the thread on that is here.

Friday (Today) @ 3pm PST

thrashing-code-gopherThis Friday I’m aiming to cover some Go basics before moving further into the Colligere CLI  app. Here are the highlights of the plan.

  1.  I’m going to cover some of the topics around program structure including: type declarations, tuple assignment, variable lifetime, pointers, and other variables.
  2.  I’m going to cover some basics on packages, initialization of packages, imports, and scope. This is an important aspect of ongoing development with Colligere since we’ll be pulling in a number of packages for generation of the data.
  3. Setting up configuration and schema for the Colligere application using Viper and related tooling.

Tuesday, October 2nd @ 3pm PST

thrashing-code-terraformThis session I’m aiming to get some more Terraform work done around the spin up and shutdown of the cluster. I’ll dig into some more specific points depending on where I progress to in sessions previous to this one. But it’s on the schedule, so I’ll update this one in the coming days.

 

Wrap Up for August of 2018

Thrashing Code Sessions via Twitch & Kick Ass Dis-Sys Meetup

Got some excellent coding and systems setup coming up in the next few days. Also a meetup on the 28th with Tim Kellogg and Alena Hall presenting on some interesting topics around distributed database data working on Kubernetes and WebAssembly of the hot temperament type. A new surprise guest addition on my Twitch channel that is scheduled to swing into Valhalla and help build out a cluster and respective needed DHCP, DNS, and related configuration for a setup on the metal!

Schedule

 

Thor Project Opens Up, Building the Cloud Foundry Ecosystem with the Community

The Iron Foundry Team are big advocates of open source software. We write code across all sorts of languages, just like many of the development shops out there do. Sometimes we’re heavy on the .NET, other times we’re all up in some Java, Ruby on Rails, spooling up a Node.js Application or something else. So keeping with our love of open source and our polyglot nature we’ve created the Thor Project with three distinct apps.

Before jumping into the applications though, a little context for what and where Thor is in the grand scheme of things. We need to roll back to the Cloud Foundry Project to get into that. The Cloud Foundry Project is an open source project built around software for PaaS (Platform as a Service) which can be used to build your own PaaS internally or externally, in a cloud provider or directly on hardware. It’s your choice how, when and where you want to use it. For more context on PaaS check out my previous entry “The Confusions of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS“.

Thor Project

Cocoa for OS-X

Thor Odinson
Thor Odinson, God of Thunder

You know who Thor is right? He’s this mythic Norse God, also known as the God of Thunder. Since we’re all about bringing the hamma we welcomed Thor into our team’s stable of applications. So starting immediately we’ve released Thor into the realms for contributions and fighting the good open source software battle! If you’d like to join the effort, check out the github project and feel free to join us!

Technically, what is the Thor Application? This is a Cocoa Application built for OS-X that is used for managing, deploying and publishing applications to Cloud Foundry enabled and or Iron Foundry extended PaaS Environments.

.NET for Windows 7

The .NET Metro version of the Thor Application is also released via github with a provided installer. We’ve almost taken the same path, except of course for the very different UX and UI queues with Windows 7 and the Metro UX design guidelines.

WinRT for Windows 8

I wasn’t really sure what to call this version. Is it Metro or WinRT or Windows 8 or something else? Anyway, there is a project, it is albeit empty at this point, but it is the project where the Windows 8 version of Thor will go! For now get the Windows 7 version and install it on Windows 8, it won’t have touch interface support and things, but should work just like a regular application on Windows 8.

The Code

To get started with these, generally you’d just clone the repo and do a build, then get started checking out the code. There is one catch, for the OS-X version you’ll want to pull down the sub-modules with the following command.

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
git clone git@github.com:YourForkHere/Thor.git
git submodule update –init –recursive
[/sourcecode]

Once you do that in XCode just make sure to then select the right project as the starting build project.

…then when the application is launched…

Thor Running in OS-X
Thor Running in OS-X

I’ll have more in the coming days and weeks about Thor & Iron Foundry. For now, check out the blog entry on the Iron Foundry Blog and subscribe there for more information.

HighBall Part Duex (#4) Patterns

Navigation of Highball Series Part #1 | Part #2 | Part #3 | Part #4

Here in part #4 I want to cover the final wire up I did to get the initial screens to show.  The other primary focus of this blog entry is to cover some of the architectural patterns behind what I have so far.  We haven’t touched upon testing this yet, primarily because I’m stepping through wiring both Silverlight & WPF with these libraries for the first time.  I’ve done the WPF before, but not both.  Soon enough, I’ll get back to good standard practice and get some tests done first.  But for now, here’s the low down on wiring up Silverlight and the architectural patterns so far.

Architectural Patterns & Ideas

Dependency Injection

This is one of interesting parts of the application, at least to me.  For many the dependency injection is endlessly confusing, but it comes in immensely helpful in getting things loosely coupled and all wired up.  Because even when you decouple things, they do have to get wired up again – it’s just the how that’s important.  Below is an example of a presenter in the schedule module that uses constructor based dependency injection.  Dig it?  I’ll have another follow up entry in the future about what and how Dependency Injection works, along with the respective Dependency Inversion, Inversion of Control, and all those other patterns.  For now, just now that this is how the view gets registered with the region that is responsible for displaying it when the application runs.

[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
public class ScheduleViewAllPresenter : IModule
{
private readonly IRegionViewRegistry regionViewRegistry;

public ScheduleViewAllPresenter(IRegionViewRegistry registry)
{
regionViewRegistry = registry;
}

public void Initialize()
{
regionViewRegistry.RegisterViewWithRegion("HighBallMainRegion", typeof(ScheduleViewAllView));
}
}
[/sourcecode]

In the code snippet above you’ll see in the initialize method that the view that is injected is registered to the particular region that it will be displayed in.  In the shell the view will be displayed in the region as shown below.

[sourcecode language=”xml”]

[/sourcecode]

Composite Modules

I’ve added a single module to the solution so far.  This module has two views & their respective presenters, which I’ll cover in the section below.  The module is simply a project, loosely coupled, that will provide a view and the presentation logic for that view to be injected into the shell upon some application logic.

The module itself isn’t so much a pattern but more an architectural piece of the application.  As I move forward on this project I’ll add more modules to the solution as functionality is needed.  Each module will have an isolated, or mostly isolated, business use.  The first example that I have is the HighBall.Interface.Modules.ScheduleModule.  I’ll be adding more, probably along these lines;  mileage tracking, vehicle inventory, driver check-in, driver route choice, etc.  Each having a particular part of functionality that will primarily be isolated to itself.

When the CAL is used within a development team the modules would most likely be split off to individual pairs in the case of Agile, or even entire teams.  In Agile parlance each module would be a number of user stories, or in the most simple form, a single user story.

View & Presenter, with no Model yet.

The view and presenter are where you get to see the Model View Presenter (MVP) first start to appear.  Eventually as I move forward there will be the model, and more elaboration on the view and presenter.  For now all we have is the view, which is just the xaml markup and the presenter which is responsible for registering the view in the registry, and initializing the view with a region that it would be displayed in.  As you can see above in the Dependency Injection example the presenter is very thin at this point.

So that summarizes the cut off point for my first basic release of HighBall.  Check out the code release, rant at me about deficiencies, and if you have any additional ideas or other elaborations you’d like to see please do comment.

Currently I’m researching how to put TDD into effect to build the presenters, views, and other composite pieces of this application.  My next entry will have several examples of unit tests that aren’t currently included in this release.  Until then, happy hacking (or coding).