Graham Dawson

The Problem With Living (aka I got a job and forgot how to blog)

Apparently getting a job means I forget how to do this blogging thing.

Oh well.

I’m currently working for Bluetel as a sort of not-quite-UX/fronted guy. I think - I’m not entirely sure, now - I signed up with them to develop microservices, but that hasn’t really happened as such. Nevertheless, I’m having a lot of fun writing javascript, knitting sass and making things look generally pretty.

And occasionally getting shat on for using nth-child() constructions, which I thought were rather clever until they hit the cold, hard walls of reality. But enough of that.

I’m also shortly moving house, which means that I’ll probably not be blogging again for another six or more months, because that’s just how life is.

Oh well.

Check Your Cabling

It’s a simple thing, but it’s one we always forget: microphone cables can fail without warning, especially during calls, and especially when there’s a smug little cat around who likes to nibble on them.

Always carry spares. It’ll save you a great deal of embarrassment.

RPC Hell: The Web That Entangles Microservices

In the Microservices world, APIs are hell.

No, let me put that another way: REST is hell. SOA is hell. RPC is hell. Anything that looks like a pipe? Hell.

The promise of the Microservices Architecture is that of being able to expand the scope of an application by dropping new services into an existing composition, and have that new service consume and produce data to improve the composition as a whole.

Passive House Project: Visualising Events with MuonJS

In the previous post, we looked at creating a simple service with Muon and using that to feed event data to the Photon Event Store. Now we’re going to use that stored data to generate simulated sensor data and use a ReactJS front-end and MuonJS Gateway to display that data.

Passive House Project: Introducing Muon

As mentioned in the introductory post, I’ll be using a toolkit called Muon to connect my services and handle all of the communication between them. I chose Muon because its use of event-sourcing and CSP fits in with how my brain tends to work, not to mention the whole concepot of events is a javascript staple.

I’ll be writing the ReactJS/Redux UX in es6, which means I’ll need a little bit of transpiling at that point. All the usual stuff, like webpack, babel and so on. All the other services are all in whatever works at the time.

Exploiting Microservices To The Full with Muon, Reactjs and Redux

This will be a series of articles covering a project to write a simple set of microservices to manage arbitrary environmental sensors in a passive house. The sensors will be fake (for now, at least; eventually I plan to incorporate live sensors) but the interactions between the services will all be as real as they get.

I’ll be using React.JS with Redux and Muon for the browser side of things, and Node.js with Muon for the services.