Paul Wilson

Articles from our blog by Paul Wilson

Introducing Cultivate's Bytesize Blog

We have launched a new blog for small nuggets of technical information ('bytesized' - geddit?) that we have picked up along the way.
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Full stack developers versus full stack teams

Cultivate do not differentiate between Front End and Back End Developers, yet we acknowledge that expertise in either field is too difficult for most people to achieve. How do we resolve this apparent contradiction?
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GenServer call time-outs

What exactly happens when `GenServer.call/3` times out? Let's find out.
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Communicating with C from Elixir using Ports

On occasion your Elixir is going to want to interact with an external program. This may be for speed, but more likely you are going to want to take advantage of a library that has been written in C. The most common options are using Ports and Native Interface Functions (NIFs).
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Three alternatives to using GenEvent in Elixir

For various reasons, may people are not fond of GenEvent. Here are some examples of using some good alternatives for broadcasting and subscribing to types of event: gproc, Phoenix PubSub, and the new process registry to be included in Elixir 1.4.
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Ruby constant resolution

Module and class nesting is how Ruby does namespacing, but it's not always that well known how constants are resolved.
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Walk / Hike research

Looking conversations with UK walkers/hikers
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On the Scaled Agile Framework

A few months a ago a I successfully completed the Scaled Agilist Certification course and exam, for the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). These are my thoughts on SAFe.
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The Many Faces of Test Driven Development

Like many religious wars, the Test Driven Development debate seems interminable, unpleasant, and not a little tedious. "Mocks Suck and cause brittle tests." "No, including real collaborators in your tests makes them brittle." "That's not a unit test". "It's not about testing, it's about design." "No, it's about documentation."
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Practice Makes Perfect

In December last year, around 3,000 programmers in 160 cities around the world gave up their Saturday to write code — code they deliberately threw away. They were not being weird or frivolous. They were there to take part in The Global Day of Code Retreat, and improve their craft.
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The future of Ruby

I am not a very old-school Rubyist. My involvement dates from 2005 when I, along with many of my Extreme Programming (XP) colleagues, joined the Great Rails Bandwagon. It is telling that so many of the people who became involved around that time were from the Agile/XP community. We were sick of the mountains of glue code and XML configuration that stood in the way of us getting things done in Enterprise Java.
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