Mandate the publication of a standard set of APIs and events by public sector organisations. Starting with an expectation that every new service in central government departments will have an open API.

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

What distinguishes software architecture from coding and design? Many things, including the role that architects have in defining architectural characteristics, the important aspects of the system independent of the problem domain. Many organizations describe these features of software with a variety of terms, including nonfunctional requirements, but we dislike that term because it is self-denigrating. Architects created that term to distinguish architecture characteristics from functional requirements, but naming something nonfunctional has a negative impact from a language standpoint: how can teams be convinced to pay enough attention to something “nonfunctional”? Another popular term is quality attributes, which we dislike because it implies after-the-fact quality assessment rather than design. We prefer architecture characteristics because it describes concerns critical to the success of the architecture, and therefore the system as a whole, without discounting its importance.

An architecture characteristic meets three criteria:

• Specifies a nondomain design consideration
• Influences some structural aspect of the design
• Is critical or important to application success

Source: Mark Richards and Neal Ford. Software Architecture 2024 V2 . Kindle Edition.

Neal Ford and Mark Richards

Short update, better than nothing though.

Wednesday to Friday

Sleep was not great this week. 2am wake ups and not falling back to sleep until 6ish, often referred to as middle-of-the-night insomnia. Work didn't happen on Wednesday but resumed on Thursday and Friday.

Listening

Lex Friedman's podcast episodes are long! Still haven't completed the Pieter Levels episode. I love his tool selection - jQuery, PHP, SQLite - for building is start ups, very much in line with choose boring tech that I'm a big believer in.

Work

I suggested Show The Thing format at work as a replacement of the drier financial updates. I went first with showing the legacy point-of-sale system I am integrating with as part of my work with Openr. Two other colleagues showed a thing as well. I think this format suits a consultancy quite well.

Saturday

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ We visited K's godfather. Took the opportunity to try Squerryes Winery Parkrun. Loved running through the vineyard. Would like to return to the taproom.

Sunday

The boy ran junior Parkrun in additional to Saturday's 5k. He's determined to get a fast time. His mate comes first every week, at around 7 mins 30 seconds.

🌻 I am going to grow spinach over autumn and winter. I finished off preparing the right-hand side raised bed by removing as many weeds and wood chips as I could, improving the top layer of soil by digging in soil improver in the form of farmyard manure. Then I planted three rows of spinach 'Gigante d'Inverno' seeds spaced 30cm apart. In a few weeks time, I'll sow again so I spinach is growing through to the winter.

📺 The boy and I watched Instant Family which is about the emotional journey through fostering and adoption, followed by Ninja Warrior Juniors USA final!

🎧 Listens

Whilst listening to another podcast about the rise of SQLite, the guest talked about aphantasia which is a condition that prevents individuals from visualising images in their minds. After doing a brief, not very scientific test on myself, this is something I probably have to some degree. I definitely can't summon images into my mind. I didn't realise this was even a thing.

I gave the latest Nick Cave album a listen. What stood out most was the use of a gospel-ish backing singers and Colin Greenwood on bass!. Very interesting read about Nick Cave's relationship with theology, particularly with Christianity and the references to this in Wild God.

Notable reads

I read another blog post about databases. This time Ethan McCue's Just use Postgres blogpost.

Martin Fowler revised his original post on Strangler Fig, the metaphor to describe a gradual approach to legacy modernisation. We used this lots at MoJ. It's easier said than done but I came to be a believer in that its mostly the only workable method, but takes time, just like nature takes time to do its work.

For work I have a mandatory secure development course that includes a web security lab. PortSwigger has a broad array of details topics on web security covering the ones you'd expect but also advanced, newer topics like Web LLM attacks.

One thing I did learn was that, even though I have multi-factor authentication set up for AWS, it's not truly multi-factor. I use a password and a passkey but they both are provided by password manager using my fingerprint. It's very convenient though. Maybe I should continue getting a second factor from my phone's authenticator app, which is slightly more time consuming, but more secure.

Here are a few way I explore CSV files, with DuckDB being a new entrant.

CSVKit

I find myself working with CSV files these days. I sometimes need to look around inside. For 10s of rows, a text editor will do - I just use VS Code. csvlook from csvkit is great too.

The following command will allow me to scroll through the first 500 lines of a file. The --no-inference flag informs csvlook to not infer data type and format values accordingly.

head -n 500 yourfile.csv | csvlook --no-inference | less -S

Sometimes I find myself needing to filter out rows. The following command will filter rows based on the presence of \\N in any of the columns between 1 and 12, and output the inverse (-i) results (good data) to a file.

csvgrep -c 1-12 -m "\\N" -i -a file_with_unwanted_data.csv > file-with_unwanted_rows_removed.csv

SQLite

Sometimes I want to explore the file a bit and csvkit tools becoming a bit unwieldy. SQLlite is perfect for the job. Remember, SQLite is included in macOS and Mac OS X by default, so sqlite-utils will just work once installed.

This command switches to CSV mode and imports the CSV file into a table called prices:

sqlite>.mode csv
sqlite>.import prices.csv prices

Julia Evans mentioned sqlite-utils in her blog post sqlite-utils: a nice way to import data into SQLite for analysis It's another tool from the prolific Simon Willison.

The following command installs sqlite-utils and uses it to create a new databases called prices.db (sqlite is a file-based database) with a table called prices with records inserted into the table from the CSV file:

brew install sqlite-utils

Once installed, you can import with this command:

sqlite-utils insert prices.db prices prices.csv --csv

With large files, Simon notes sqlite-utils can be slower compared to using SQLite directly. You can import JSON and other formats just as easily.

Once you have a SQLite database, use standard SQL to query.

DuckDB

I just listed to a podcast on Software Engineering Daily about DuckDB. The founder, Hannes Mühleisen, makes a claim that the DuckDB team have inadvertently built the worlds best CSV reader.

duckdb -c  "select * from read_csv('prices.csv')"

DuckDB doesn't need to ingest the data into its database engine. There are clients for various programming languages. And you can read from many different data formats beyond CSV. Paul Gross has started to use DuckDB as a replacement for jq.

Wednesday to Friday

Working. I was asked to help with a pitch for some central government work which was a good prompt to get back in touch with a few ex-colleagues.

The start-up I'm working for now has a marketing website. A few of us went for after-work drinks. £7.85 for a Neck Oil! wtf.

Saturday

The boy and I went to Brighton on the train to meet up with my sisters and my nephews. Annoyingly I bought single fare train tickets. Returns are marginally more expensive whereas two single trips is double the price. Doesn't seem like single-leg fares have been realised yet. The train journey was time to play more Front Armies.

Sunday

Early morning walk, quickly followed by addressing the aphid infestation on one my plants in the front of house flowerbed with the help of Claude, packed away the last bits from last week's camping trip, weeded the back garden and lugged the tent from garage to car to dry it in K's garden.

📺 Watched the first episode of Celebrity Race Against the World.

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ I went for a 5k run. I've changed the running screen on my Coros watch to remove pace as I'm only focussed on zone 2 running at the mo, which means keeping my heart rate between 125 and 145 BPM.

I bought compost and mulch and two varieties of spinach seeds. This autumn I'm going to see if I can turn the raised beds into food producing beds. I need to do a second, more intricate weeding session this week, and I'll pop the seeds in after the forecast heat wave.

📺 Alone, series 11 is on the History Channel. We watched three episodes!

🎧 Geeky listens

Great discussion about DuckDB on Software Engineering Daily. Kind of like SQLite but optimised for analytical use-cases.

Learnt a lot about lambdas and containers from two AWS developers who work on the serverless team.

I love Andrea Goulet's work. I first came across her on the Legacy Code Rocks podcast. Her main focus these days is empathy in tech. This conversation features systems thinking, a great cog metaphor for influence and a great description of systems engineering.

Douglas Crockford was the guy who came up with JSON data format, amongst other things. He received a death threat from someone in the XML community in the early days of JSON! He's writing a book on mathematics for kids without all the historical mistakes that's still used when teaching maths today. Might get that for E.

Holiday, again 😁

Monday = work and evening of packing and playing tetris loading the car and its roof-box.

🕹️ On the ferry over to France, the boy and I played Front Armies, connecting two phones via hotspot to play the LAN version. It's the first time I've played a computer game for ages. It certainly made the crossing go faster.

🐚 We had three beach days. Utah beach was good for sandcastles and a game of Mölkky. It's not so great for swimming. At low tide you can walk out a few hundred metres and you're still up to your knees only. On Plage d'AnneVille-sur-mer it was 1km walk to the sea from the dunes where we set up camp. A sign warned us not to swim because of strong currents. Later in the day, kite surfers appeared as the tide came in. Omaha beach was third time lucky with swimming.

🛶 We paddled three Canadian canoes downstream for an hour and picnicked. Beautiful, picturesque countryside, bales of hay, cows and horses watching us as we meandered. Coming back was physically hard. It was upstream and windy in the wrong direction. It took two hours of constant rowing. If I stopped, we went backwards. Occasionally we got spun round and headed in the wrong direction because of a strong gust. Massive sense of achievement at the end!

🐠 Our only rainy day was spent at La Cité de la Mer. The Ocean of the Future exhibition was excellent and the boy really enjoyed it, which isn't always a given. Aquariums and interactive displays in the dark. A quick caffeine break resulted in a coffee with whipped cream; order a cappuccino at your peril in France. We queued 1.5 hours to go aboard the Le Redoutable which was well worth the wait. Being up close gives you an appreciation of the engineering required to manoeuvre a submarine, sustain human life for months, run a mini nuclear power station to fuel and keep the sub quiet, let alone house atomic missiles.

After each day out we came back to the campsite, swam, drank local beer, made food, played games, kids went feral with other camp kids and slept soundly. Go there.

Thursday to Wednesday

I was in Pembrokeshire up until Wednesday, staying with K's parents. It's E's second summer trip. We:

🚴‍♂️ cycled 9 miles round Llys-y-Frân Lake

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ ran Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve parkrun

🌊 got wet, bashed around and felt fear jumping from heights (or not actually having the nerve to jump in my case) taking part in coasteering led by Martin (book direct @ https://www.coastal-adventures.co.uk/)

🐚 dug a whole and buried E in sand at Cwm-yr-Eglwys, got involved in a few of the regatta activities (didn't win the egg and spoon) and swam in the sea 🌊

🍺 fed and watered ourselves at The Sloop and The Royal Oak which also had a bunch of people in the corner playing folk music

🏠 tuned into the Olympics, introduced E to Shithead the card game back at the ranch and I yak-shaved this blog every so often

📺 watched Rams, the aussie version

Thursday and Friday

Would usually go into the office on a Thursday but E was home. Friday went in for a leadership meeting focussing on company strategy and how we adapt it to make it relevant to my local business unit (called club in AND Digital vernacular) level. Also met with other practice leads to sync on competency frameworks.

Saturday and Sunday

🏋️‍♂️ Whilst exercising at the gym I listened to tunes instead of podcasts. Brain needed a rest.

🎧 I mostly use Qobuz to listen and discover music. They have a magazine of sorts. The article I clicked on was "Merge Records in 10 Albums". The article was peppered with bands. I tried listening to Mountain Goats but they were not for me. The next band, described as "offbeat '80s dreap-pop" was Destroyer. They've been going since 1995. The top tracks suggested to me have me hooked so will be coming back for more.

Slowly getting ready for holiday two in Normandy. Camping for the 3rd time this year! Back to the same French campsite as last year.

⚽️ Walked over to Selhurst Park to watch Crystal Palace vs Nantes, a pre-season friendly. We were joined by with neighbours and met a couple of friends along the way. Great day for the 5 kids! They played a footie afterwards, thankfully in the shade.

Surfing

• Found a source for old films that may be worth a watch. Kind of tired of the formulaic content on the streaming channels

Complexity is the gotcha of event-driven architecture. David Boyne talks about the inevitable complexity of EDAs at part of GOTO's most recent EDA Day.

What was new to me was the The project paradox which is summed up by the question "Why do we take the biggest decisions at a time when we have the least knowledge?".

EDAs ease this because they are evolutionary by nature but can get complex quickly if not managed, which you do by documenting your events and architecture.