Now bear with me here, as this is a slight detour from our normal engineering-focused posts - this one is about a card game we made…

At AWS re:Invent 2014, Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) announced Amazon Lambda. He described it as “an event-driven computing service for dynamic applications” and it’s going to change the way you think about computing resources forever!

Instead of having dedicated resources on all the time to process code (via a cron / job queue / whatever), you can now have Lambda functions execute if and only if events happen. Triggering these events is as simple as uploading a file to an S3 bucket, or adding records to a DynamoDB or Kinesis stream.

Brum Tech Scene is a series of interviews hosted by Stuart Langridge (@sil) with people on the tech scene in Birmingham, UK. Usually there’s a new interview available every Monday morning, just in time for your start-the-week coffee.

This week, Talis are lucky enough to have been featured.

While the urge to create your own, fit exactly for your purpose, API may seem appealing, don’t disregard the idea of implementing around standards from the beginning: you might be surprised at the benefits they bring in places you didn’t expect.

At last week’s Talis Hackday I worked on “powering up” Lord Zeus, our Hubot plug-in to Hipchat. Hubot can be great fun and amazingly useful. We added scripts that were both.

Working on a side project? Ready to launch but don’t have / don’t want to spend money on hosting it?

There is certainly no shortage of tools to help you host, build and deploy your software, but most of it doesn’t come for free. If you’re working on your own project and need to integrate a bunch of different technologies it can become expensive quickly. I have a side project that has lots of moving parts and I thought it’d be a useful exercise to see if I could host, test, continuously deploy, monitor and log it for zero cost - here are my findings.

This is a presentation I gave to the NoSQL and Big Data Birmingham meetup group a couple of weeks back, and actually it’s a redux of a presentation I gave a couple of years ago at MongoDB UK.

It tells the story of what has been quite a journey for us over the last couple of years, as we migrated away from a general purpose graph database technology to managing our graph data in a document database.

Well, I guess I’d better start with an explanation. It’s been four months since I joined Talis… and just over four months since I asked the CTO what the dress code was in time for my first day.

We’ve been having a lot of discussion in the Talis development team recently about dependency management. It all kicked off from an, at the time, rather innocuous question of “_why do we need a composer.lock file checked in?_” in our PHP projects. There are differences of opinion on this - you can also browse other related pages and make your own mind up. The ‘official’ line, from one of the Composer authors can be found in Composer Best Practices, specifically here and here.

Earlier this year, version 4 of Express was released. It’s got a bunch of pretty big changes, so if you’re thinking of upgrading, you’re going to need to be aware of them. Hopefully at the end of this post you shouldn’t be too daunted when thinking of updating your version.