Lock-in is something we don’t sell at Singing Horse Studio LLP. We love our customers to stay with us, but not because they have to. How do we make sure our customers aren’t locked in? An open source stack, standard published frameworks, simple source code, and a test suite that ensures future programmers can understand… [Continued]
We run a software company. We specialise in writing business tools, payments engines and data layers that can be scaled up to epic proportions. As you might expect, we write tools to help us run our company. Any task we need to carry out more than once or twice is usually automated. We have a… [Continued]
We all know the old adage … “Quality, Features, Time: pick two”. It’s a useful reminder that trying to squeeze too many features into too little time will inevitably impact quality. It’s also a useful reminder that focussing only on quality will lead to a reduction of the rate of feature development. And it even… [Continued]
Scope creep can be a killer. Adding features to a work in progress almost always causes trouble. At its simplest, the extra work delays the delivery of the current phase of a project and increases cost. Subtler effects include a gradual degradation of the quality of a project. Changing requirements contribute to a shifting of… [Continued]
What are horizontal and vertical scaling? And when do you use them? Vertical scaling is adding oomph to the machine that an application is running on. Perhaps your e-commerce site is getting more traffic as your business grows, and it’s starting to creak at the seams. A common way to give the application a boost,… [Continued]
I attended the Amazon Web Services Cloud for Start-Ups & Developers Event in London today, there were several really useful talks and a nice run through of some of the newer AWS technologies. Here are my top three picks from the day: #1 EC2 Autoscaling We got some demos of some very solid and practical… [Continued]
My mother always told me about the carpenter who would measure twice and cut once. It didn’t make any sense to me as a kid, but I soon understood exactly what she meant the day I built my first set of shelves. Hrm. If only I had listened to her sooner … It seems that… [Continued]
Hah. So here’s something of a Nose gotcha that caught me out the other day, and hopefully you won’t make the same mistake as me! In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, Nose is a neat Python test discovery and runner. Essentially you can point it at your Python source code and it… [Continued]
As part of any project we undertake, we usually like to work in a particular style. Now, ultimately we want to follow a process that our clients enjoy, that allows us to finish projects within a well-defined and predictable time-scale, and that allows clients to launch products earlier rather than later to give best return… [Continued]
It’s happened to the best of us; no matter what scalability plans we put into place, no matter how many horizontally scaled virtual hosts we spin up, no matter how we shard our carefully crafted data, no matter how many greens we show in our automated tests, there’s always one element that might just catch… [Continued]