Digital BeeHive

Welcome to the Digital BeeHive.

After many years of working in software development, I have settled into a better understanding of what it takes to create a smooth development process. As a software architect, I have seen how much time is spent on adapting to changes in languages, platforms, and operating systems. I honestly think that this is simply a distraction from the real work that we want to be doing. We need to understand what is happening at the technical level, but we need more than that to create useful applications. We need to get the development process right, and know how to deliver the application. We need to understand the real issues related to networked applications, because stand-alone applications are quickly fading away as everything becomes Internet-enabled. We have to understand distributed computing and event-driven systems as the variety and capabilities of computing expands. Last of all, we need to understand how ideas can be represented as data, and understand how to convert back and forth between ideas and data. Then we can have software that is really useful.

I currently work in the healthcare insurance industry, and the challenges of moving towards a continuous-delivery model is a challenge we are facing now. With tools like Maven and Jenkins, we have come a long way, but we still have a ways to go until we can provide high-quality feature updates at the end of every sprint. With dynamic provisioning of containers and VMs, we'll be able to test the application and then deploy it to customers while maintaining all the necessary quality checks to provide the best value possible.