Vlog
Akka, Java, and Spring
Akka is one of the most prominent and powerful frameworks for building reactive distributed systems, but it's not a perfect fit for every project. In particular, Akka is strongly associated with the Scala language, and Typesafe's ecosystem in particular, and most of the large-scale software projects that could benefit from Akka's event processing capabilities are already committed to other languages and tools. In this post, I'll give a quick overview of how to integrate an Akka ActorSystem into an otherwise commonplace Spring Boot application, written in Java, just as one might encounter in many business and startup environments. But first, some background.
Docker Orchestration with Apache Mesos and Marathon
The Docker engine is very quickly making its way through our technology radar here at Spantree. In this screencast, Cedric shows how Docker can be used to reap the benefits of isolation and portability traditionally reserved for VMs, but with the low overhead typically reserved for bare metal. He also shows how you can use Docker in concert with Apache Mesos and Marathon to provide fault-tolerance and scale your applications across a cluster of machines.
Swift for Groovy Programmers
When I sat down to learn about Apple's new programming language, Swift, a few months ago, I started noticing similarities to other languages. This wasn't suprising, as it was touted as a language that drew from languages commonly accepted as being productive for the developer. We heavily use Groovy here at Spantree, and a lot of the syntax and concepts in Swift reminded me of Groovy. This presentation is the first of a few to familiarize other Groovy programmers with the language.
Elasticsearch Workshop @ Strangeloop 2014
Spantree was honored to be selected to give a half-day workshop at the prestigious Strangeloop Conference in St Louis. Search-based use cases are often key to the user experience of the products we work on. Elasticsearch has quickly become our "go-to" data store for search and analytics. Having worked with it so frequently, we've developed a deep expertise with many of its ins-and-outs. We've compiled this knowledge into a full-day hands-on workshop, available on Github and in-person as part of our training offering. For Strangeloop, we tried our best to compress it down to the half-day format and what resulted is a fairly breakneck-paced crash course which we're making available for free right here.
Taming the Cloud with Hipster Devops @ Cloudscape 2014
Spantree works very closely with our business partners to provide more holistic value to some of our larger clients. One of these business partners, Greenpages, invited us to speak at their annual cloud conference to wax poetically about that "hipster devops stuff" we keep advocating. The video below is a one-hour overview of Spantree's philosophy on devops, showing off tools like Git, Puppet, Vagrant, Jenkins, Packer, Asgard, JMeter, and Simian Army. Believe it or not, Cedric managed to get through the whole stack in under an hour.