• What Does a Technical Author Look Like? - While working with my colleague Mike Mason on a forthcoming article, we asked Stable Diffusion to come up with portraits of technical authors. We thought the results were worth sharing. [Martin Fowler]
• "I'd been building applications wrong for the last 20+ years." - In the summer of 2021 my friend Aaron Pedersen asked me to join him at IBM to rebuild an internal knowledge and sharing platform called Lighthouse. He'd been working on the front-end architecture of this application for years with a team called JLoop. They'd done a great job of creating a UI that was well thought out, and easy to use. IBM loved their contributions but the application still had fatal flaws. [Event Store blog]
• Using ChatGPT as a technical writing assistant - My colleague Mike Mason is an experienced software developer and architect. He's also an skillful writer, with a couple of books under his belt together with plenty of writing for Thoughtworks, including a regular macro-trends article and contributing to the Thoughtworks Technology Radar. In the last couple of months he's been experimenting with Large Language Models (LLMs) both for programming and prose writing. Here he focuses on the latter, sharing how he's been able to make effective use of ChatGPT. [Martin Fowler]
• How to test event-driven projections - Projections in an event-driven world are a way to interpret registered events. We can take a sequence of events and build from them read… [Event-Driven by Oskar Dudycz]

Permalink | From 24 April 2023 to 30 April 2023 | Last updated on: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 14:06:34 GMT

• Introduction to Axon Synapse - We're happy to announce the first public release, version 0.6.0 of Axon Synapse. [AxonIQ Blog]
• Testing, Testing…our Heuristics - Recently Chelsea Troy and I chatted over Zoom about software testing heuristics. I met Chelsea last year at DDD Europe. In this and a couple of snack-sized posts, I will reflect on some highlights of our conversation. Chelsea has also … Continue reading → [The Responsible Designer]
• Parser Combinators (Full Stack Europe) - I was at Full Stack Europe 2022 in Antwerp, and one of the speakers had to cancel. So I offered to do an improvised talk on Parsers Combinators. (My Covid Lockdown hobby was creating an open source library to help you build parsers, so I have some experience. ) A parser is a function that takes some unstructured input and returns something more structured. One way to write them is using a lot of procedural code. But with parser combinators, you can create a parser declaratively by combining small composable parsers into larger ones. [Mathias Verraes]
• Publishing read model changes from Marten - Integrations have different names, shades and colours, but only one adjective: challenging. Trying to glue systems together requires… [Event-Driven by Oskar Dudycz]

Permalink | From 17 April 2023 to 23 April 2023 | Last updated on: Sun, 23 Apr 2023 14:06:33 GMT

• An example of LLM prompting for programming - A couple of weeks ago I watched a fascinating Zoom call hosted by Xu Hao, Thoughtworks's Head of Technology in China. He showed an example of how he uses ChatGPT to help him code in a self-testing style. His initial prompt primes the LLM with an implementation strategy (chain of thought prompting). His prompt also asks for an implementation plan rather than code (general knowledge prompting). Once he has the plan he uses it to refine the implementation and generate useful sections of code. [Martin Fowler]
• Postgres Superpowers in Practice - Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! I have such a thought quite often while working with Postgres. Why? Let’s say… [Event-Driven by Oskar Dudycz]
• Programming without a stack trace: When abstractions become illusions - As the complexity of our platforms increases, we keep looking for better abstractions. Cloud compilers might help, but only if they include one key feature: the stack trace [The Architect Elevator]

Permalink | From 10 April 2023 to 16 April 2023 | Last updated on: Wed, 19 Apr 2023 22:06:36 GMT

• Sock swaps, giant maps & a new category of database : A recap of QCon London - Last week, the Event Store team attended QCon London, one of the largest international software development conferences. As exhibitors, we were excited to talk about all things Event Store and engage with attendees. Here's what we got up to. [Event Store blog]
• Slack in your plans - Recent discussions with my colleagues showed that many software teams still run into trouble because they pack too much planned work into their iterations. Teams will usually run better when they have deliberate Slack, as it allows their delivery to be more predictable and gives them time to improve their environment. While writing that bliki post, I also defined two styles of task planning in agile projects. Timeboxed Iterations are used to break up work into small chunks with a regular cadence to reassess the work and future plans. Using a little ceremony around allocating work to iterations helps make problems visible so that they can be dealt with properly. Continuous Flow dispenses with that ceremony, so skilled teams often prefer it. [Martin Fowler]
• Event stores are key-value databases, and why that matters - Event stores are the foundational building block of Event Sourcing. They’re also one of the biggest sources of confusion. They are databases… [Event-Driven by Oskar Dudycz]

Permalink | From 03 April 2023 to 09 April 2023 | Last updated on: Fri, 14 Apr 2023 22:06:33 GMT