It’s that time of year again… well, actually, a few days late, but I’ve been busy, I swear. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years’ predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new year has to offer us.

As per previous years, I’m giving myself either a +1 or a -1 based on a purely subjective and highly-biased evaluational criteria as to whether it actually happened (or in some cases at least started to happen before 31 Dec 2018 ended). And, to be fair, while I only posted the 2018 predictions a few days ago (I hadn’t realized it, but my CI system for the blog was down, which goes to show you, it helps to verify your CI system every so often), I actually wrote it a year ago, so it’s still legit.

It’s that time of year again… well, actually, a few days late, but I’ve been busy, I swear. As has become my tradition now for nigh-on a decade, I will first go back over last years’ predictions, to see how well I called it (and keep me honest), then wax prophetic on what I think the new year has to offer us.

As per previous years, I’m giving myself either a +1 or a -1 based on a purely subjective and highly-biased evaluational criteria as to whether it actually happened (or in some cases at least started to happen before 31 Dec 2017 ended).

More than a decade ago, I published Effective Enterprise Java, and in the opening chapter I talked about the Ten Fallacies of Enterprise Computing, essentially an extension/add-on to Peter Deutsch’s Fallacies of Distributed Computing. But in the ten-plus years since, I’ve had time to think about it, and now I’m convinced that Enterprise Fallacies are a different list. Now, with the rise of cloud computing stepping in to complement, supplment or replace entirely the on-premise enterprise data center, it seemed reasonable to get back to it.

At first, it was called “DLL Hell”. Then “JAR Hell”. “Assembly Hell”. Now, it’s fallen under the label of “NPM-Gate”, but it always comes back to the same basic thing: software developers need to think about their software build and runtime dependencies as a form of Supply Chain Management. Failure to do so—on both the part of the supplier and the consumer—leads to the breakdown of civilization and everything we hold dear.

tl;dr At last night’s Seattle Languages meeting, I was reminded of what intellectually-honest debate does and does not look like; then, as part of the discussions and argument around the tragic deaths of several black men at the hands of police, I was presented with a link to a page entitled “Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty”. This is good material.

tl;dr Facebook/Parse announced that they are shutting down the popular Back-end-as-a-Service. While opinions are certainly going to vary as to why, I thought it an interesting situation to examine and, upon reflection, comment.

tl;dr For years, I’ve wanted to use social media to help draw attention to the blog entries I write. But manually posting to Twitter and LinkedIn about each blog entry was just too boring to contemplate. With this latest reboot, and the fact that I’m using a CI server to generate each post, I finally decided to break down and automate the process.

tl;dr With a static-site-generated blog, it was getting painful to do all the steps necessary to push a new post out the (virtual) door. So I did what any good DevOps-minded engineer would do—I put TeamCity on the job.

tl;dr I’ve found a new blog that I’m enjoying reading so far, and thought readers might want to browser-bookmark for future consumption.