Engineering Teams

Browse curated reading for engineering professionals.

Horse Phone and Unicode at Tasktop

Horse Phone ♞☎, a Tasktop meme that has significance far beyond its unassuming appearance. A few lucky people have seen glimpses of this rare beast in demos at Tasktop – but what does it mean? Horse Phone ♞☎ is the tip of the proverbial unicode testing iceberg for Tasktop’s connectors. Our approach to testing integrations,...

Service Startup and Docker Compose

We make extensive use of Docker and Docker Compose at Tasktop for building, testing and deploying our products. One of the pain points that we run in to is services that fail to start when other services are not available – for example a web app that fails to start unless the database is already...

How to pick dependencies from a developer’s point of view

Dependencies are an essential part of each software project. Without utilizing existing libraries the scope of a project explodes because you can’t solve every problem by yourself. Today we rely heavily on open source libraries to get the work done for us. Basically there is a library for nearly every problem and every language. But how do...

Learning New Things

It’s mid-2015. Our product and platform had evolved from a pure Java application to a mixed-technology web-based solution, and I found myself realizing that I had to up my game. I’d built many web applications before. But my drive to hone my skills was coming from the company’s need to move ahead with a faster,...

Open Sourcing Eclipse Dropwizard Tools

Here at Tasktop we really like industry standards. It’s important for us to use well known tools and frameworks to make transitions between teams easier. When it comes to creating a REST API there is no way around JAX-RS in the Java world. But JAX-RS (or one of it’s implementations) is not a full server...

ESBs Are Made For This

This is written from the perspective of an Enterprise Architect tasked with enabling an organization’s effort to be more competitive by adopting Agile. The company has turned to SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) as a way of scaling Agile since initial attempts at Agile were not successful despite lots and lots of scrum master trainings. I’m...

Software Development Productivity From The Perspective Of Developers

If Isaac Newton were alive today, we might have the Newtonian laws of software development: For every increase in our ability to construct complex software, there shall be an equal increase in the demand for even more complex software. One solution to keeping up with this increased demand might be to apply artificial intelligence techniques...

The Key To Successful Software Lifecycle Integration Deployments

I experienced my first small earthquake (a 4.7 magnitude on the Richter scale) in Vancouver, over the Christmas holiday. I didn’t even realize it was happening, since I was sleeping.  This got me thinking about planning, not only for my family’s safety, but also in general.  As a developer, planning was key to the Agile...

Break Your Hand, It’s Good For You

As a software engineer, the thought of breaking bones in my hand makes me wince. It’s a worst nightmare that I’d really rather not think about. Apart from the pain involved, my hands are the essential conduit that I use to manifest my ideas as code. As I approached a fallen tree at full speed...