Are you using pair programming to learn from your peers, write better code and save time spent on code reviews? In that case, you might want to make it visible on your digital issue board too. However, in Azure DevOps, you can only have a single assignee per task. Through customizing your process and board you can still show who are working together on a task. Here is how to do it.

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With a few lines of code you can process Vert.X streams using any Reactive Streams implementation, while preserving backpressure. The Reactive Streams helpers can convert Vert.X streams to the Publishers and Subscribers of Reactive Streams. The API is a bit confusing at first, this article will clear it up.

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There are several recurring wishes our clients bring to us, one of which is speed, to improve time to market. However, there is no dial that we can turn to deliver value faster. Software teams are not like cars; there’s no accelerator pedal. Even if we try to speed up by adding more resources, in many cases, the actual bottleneck will just become more apparent.

In our search for increased delivery of value, we hunt for these bottlenecks. No two contexts are the same, and for this story, we have a particular context in mind. Symptoms in different organizations are often similar, and our story might apply to your setting if you recognize the problems we encountered.

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Multi Products Scrum teams are in reality observed often. One team serving different stakeholders and customer segments. Both would like to use the same people to work on their improvements.

In most organizations there tend to be more products than teams. While scaling frameworks give solutions on how to cope with a big Product and orchestrating value delivery among multiple teams. But how to deal with many products and a few Scrum teams?

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While trying to upgrade my programming skills, I ran into a new-fangled way to do ifs.

The example below is taken from code that gets a value for a property of a class. A value may or may not be set and if it isn’t the code should use a default.

You can find the code here [on Github].

So my classic go-to solution was to use an if statement like this:

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Event messaging is a powerful concept for sending notifications between decoupled services in your backend. In a previous blog post, my colleague already explained a lot about this topic using Amazon’s SNS and SQS.
In this blog post I will focus on how you can setup event messaging in AWS using SNS and SQS, but with the handy use of Terraform.

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Do you sometimes feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day? Reliving the same day over and over again? I sure feel like that in some discussions with my team: revisiting the same discussion multiple times, because we fail to document decisions properly. Redrawing that diagram one more time, to come to the same conclusion. Searching for that one document in your email? Sifting through several versions of the same document, not sure which version is the latest? 

Next time around you can avoid these situations, using simple tools that your team is already using: Git and Markdown. Add Architecture Decision Records into the mix to capture the important decisions and the context in which those decisions were made.

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Did you ever find a problem of which you weren’t sure it was a bug? You probably thought it over, looked up the requirements or discussed with a team member. Perhaps you figured it out by yourself, the requirements made things clear or your team member could help you out. Either way, you needed some source of information to recognise the problem as a bug. You used your mental models and oracles.Read more →

Federation combines the GraphQL APIs from multiple (microservice) teams into a single API. With graphql-transform-federation you can add federation to (managed) GraphQL services, generated GraphQL schemas or other GraphQL APIs. Previously the only way to add federation, was to modify your GraphQL schema. If you didn’t have control over the schema there was no way to use federation.

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