Christian Catchpole, Author at Shine Solutions Group

Java: Past, Present, Distant Past and Future

The year was 1997. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were musing on love and the motions of amusement park rides, Pathfinder landed on Mars and Leonardo DiCaprio drew Kate Winslet as per one of his French associates. It was around this time I had heard about a thing called “Java”, a fancy new language everyone was talking about. The word on IRC was that it was based on work Sun Microsystems had originally done for embedded software on set-top boxes and other smart appliances.

11 September, 2019 / 0 Comments

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DevOps Talks Conference, 2017

A light dew settles on the leaves of the venerable elm trees which track Melbourne's, St Kilda road. The bulk of the noble Yarra River moves majestically past the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, as it does every morning unaware about what is about to take place within. Light rail service number 96, which I had boarded at the iconic Luna Park, will carry me on my sovereign journey to the DevOps Talks Conference, 2017. Yet still, those lingering words circle around my mind, like plastic bags caught in the wind, waiting to be sucked into a stormwater drain. Self-doubt is setting in. Am I clearly delusional?

“You’re going to a DevOps conference? Aren't you a developer?”

This is something I had been asked on more than one occasion in the lead up to this conference. Each time I’m questioned, I point out that the term DevOps is exactly six characters long, and that more or less fifty percent of those characters are “Dev”. I have at least half a right to be here.

19 June, 2017 / 1 Comment

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SSH through a Raspberry Pi Railway Signal

lightipad We've all been there. You are in the supermarket with two bottles of diet cola in one arm and a packet of brown rice with quinoa in the other. Your site lead calls you with a request from a client who has locked themselves out of their account. Normally you would direct them to the administration interface but, because of the paradox inducing way in which they have bent the fabric of space and time, this will require some manual intervention. You need to apply some subtle but distinct database changes. Simply delete a row or two from the QUANTUM_PARADOX table. Well, it’s actually a view… but that’s not important right now.