So I've just listened to the Talk Python Podcast for digging into visual studio code and been really thinking about how useful this could be to me from day to day. I already use vs code for all my python and robot framework development I do at work and home so it's already part of my workflow. 

So the workflow for development at work is this:

1. Develop on code locally using Eclipse
2. Push changes to the build server.
3. build on the build server.
4. pull down any compiled files to local machine if required.
5. package up the code on the build server.
6. push the package to a piece of hardware for testing.

This whole process could be much simplified with points 2) and 4) if I could simply develop on the build server using the vs code remote development tools. Not only 2) and 4) would be much improved but since you can actually use the terminal built into vscode to operate on the filesystem of the remote machine then I could also run the make commands for doing the whole build and packaging process as well.

This seems ridiculously powerful!

On my home machine I have a separate installation of Linux Mint for doing all my python development on, this is for a couple of reasons:

1. I prefer developing python on Unix based systems as I have full access to the bash shell and installing python and working with packages is much simpler there.
2. Not many video games have installs for Linux so it keeps me productive :)

Well this won't help with number 2 but It will certainly help with number 1.

So Windows Subsystem for Linux seemed really good apart from you can't use any Editors with the WSL files... until now!

I would no longer have to work in vi/vim if I wanted to do any python development in WSL, instead I can use the remote development tools of vscode to have the same workflow as I would on a unix based machine. This would make using WSL on windows a possibility for me and save me some much needed space on my SSD as I will only need one OS :)

At work we occasionally have a Hackathon day where everyone in the lab is able to work on any project they like whether that's just practising some Test Driven Development(TDD) or creating something that could help with your day to day work.

So for this Hackathon I got together with Adrian Moldovan and Tom Fletcher to work on a project that would hopefully address a major issue we have at work.

Our problem is that our product has many different platforms and we don't have all the different platforms in each of the teams so we often have to share our hardware. The problem with this is that in juggling the hardware between teams some hardware can often get lost along the way.

The major problems we have are:

• Finding the a specific platform that you need to test.
• Finding hardware on a specific code level.
• Finding hardware that is in a good state for you to borrow.
• Figuring out which hardware isn't being utilised.
• Finding out who you should talk to about borrowing a piece of hardware.

As you can see we have quite a variety of kit on many different levels and this information is invaluable for quickly finding the piece of hardware you require. 

So let's talk about the tech that has been used for this project. Firstly I've been reading a lot about microservices and was intrigued by this concept of splitting out what would normally be on large application into smaller portions. By no means is this a microservice based architecture for this project as it lacks some of the required infrastructure to be that way.

This project is split into two smaller pieces:

1. A Python REST API which performs the same ssh command to multiple machines at once and combines the result into a single response.
2. A React Web Frontend which displays a table of information for multiple machines.

So the basic idea for the project was to run many of the same ssh command to all of the machines and get a point in time capture of all of the state required to solve the above problems. To achieve this we decided to use threads to be able to kick off multiple ssh sessions at once.

I tend to avoid using multi-threading whenever I can because it massively increases complexity but in this situation it seemed like the correct thing to do.

So I really liked the idea of the REST API being a really simple worked that simply ran commands on multiple machines and output the result.

I decided that we should try and keep this fairly stateless and so the only real state that the API has is a simple in memory cache which wouldn't even be necessary if it wasn't for the sheer number of machines that we are trying to perform the commands on.

The caching itself is only held for 15 minutes for each machine to ensure the data isn't too stale.

So this portion of the project is where all the shiny things happen, without this the user would need to be able to easily read and interpret JSON data which is not a skill many people have.

For ease of use we added a search functionality along with some filter buttons which will allow the user to quickly narrow down the choice that they are after. There is also a refresh functionality which will call to the API and tell it to do a full refresh not including cached data. This is mostly for people who really need the most up to date information.

For this project we really wanted to try out using Docker as we wanted to be able to deploy these two applications as simply as possible. After all this was a Hackathon and so it is a perfect opportunity to try and harness new skills.

Both projects were there own separate containers and the frontend simply needed an argument on run which passed in the address for the API.

I think the biggest things I learnt were to do with application architecture specifically how this style of application level separation of concerns allows for extendable and reusable functionality. The API itself can be used by any frontend client. If React is no longer the flavour of the month then a new frontend could be made, or if someone wanted this functionality on mobile then they could still simply call the same API.

This whole idea of containerisation I now see if incredibly powerful, it is much easier developing on the same platform that you are deploying to and also this ability to deploy anywhere that has just the one dependency of being able to run Docker is so useful. 

I will definitely be doing a lot more with Docker in future.

There are always improvements that can be made, specific ones I would like to look into are:

• Support for the OpenAPI /Swagger API Specification.
• Adding Docker Compose support for deploying both of the Containers together.

As always, when I wrote my last post I was lucky enough to have plenty of time on my hands. Recently however work has been some what manic trying to ensure that our team meets the delivery date for our new feature, which has had a knock on effect with my own projects.

I'm hoping to get back into this CMake work and really revive the JBEngine project but until work lets up I don't think that's going to happen. I'm simply writing this post to try and keep this all at the forefront of my brain. I really don't want my motivation to slip on this again!

​Thanks

The project I am scrum master for has recently begun the majority of its testing. Although it would have been much better to perform the testing as part of each of the stories, our project had two dependencies for the input into our functionality meaning we opted mostly for unit testing as verification of our stories. Due to this the majority of the functional testing is being performed at the end of the development cycle, meaning it has actually been more of a traditional waterfall development cycle. This has brought me some interesting problems to solve.

Before we adopted a more agile approach to the development lifecycle the developers would implement all the functionality and then a "Tester" would be brought in at towards the end to analyse the design documents and create a "Test Plan" for the functionality. They would be then be the "Test Lead" for that plan. The Test Lead would allocate all the testing resources, follow up on defects found and ensure the development team is aware of them.

Like I was saying earlier, our project is doing a more waterfall method of testing, the main difference is that we don't have a test lead to create the test plan or track defects or check in with how the testing is going. This is the reason I'm struggling to juggle development responsibilities with Scrum Master and essentially Test Lead responsibilities as well.

There are a number of things I'm doing to try and manage my time better, they are:

• ​Timebox Tasks
• Use a Daily To Do List
• Track Non Development Tasks as Work Items

So I sought out some advice from my manager and he told me that I should try and timebox tasks. By doing that none of my responsibilities start lacking in favour of any other. This is difficult for me as I always favour development tasks as it feels like I'm actually "getting stuff done".

I decided to create a "Daily To Do List" this involves my Scrum Master and Test Lead jobs i.e.:

• ​Check for any new Defects
• Check Completed Tests from previous day
• Alter Test Schedule based on blocking defects or Tests that were not run from the previous day

By doing this it gives me a clear goal for each of the items reducing the chance that I will forget to do something. On any one day I have to have at least done my daily to do list for me to be happy with that days work.

Okay so it's been a while since my last post and I was going to say that the reasons why I've not been doing anything is because I've been busy at work. While this is true I thought I would take this blog post to be more constructive and delve into what I've been learning/developing whilst at work.

At work I have been the lead developer for a small web application that is going to be used internally to help customer support. I have been responsible for creating the design document, discussing with other developers/stakeholders to develop the requirements and iterate over the design to come to a final solution.

In the early stages of the project I was a sole developer working on the application, I chose Flask (a Python web micro-framework) as the tool for the job. Flask is a great tool for creating web applications, as it takes a lot of the complexities away whilst not being as all encompassing as Django.

As Flask is a micro-framework it has a vast number of extensions that allow you to add extra pieces of useful functionality into your web application. Here are a list of some of the extensions I have used:

• Flask-SQLAlchemy (provides better integration of SQLAlchemy (a Python DB Abstraction Layer))
• Flask-Login (provides user based logins and also deals with session management)
• Flask-Uploads (provides easier file upload functionality)

As the project started to take shape I was given some extra development resources that I would need to lead and give direction to so the project could progress. 

Looking back I didn't do very well as a team leader at the very beginning of the project. I had various problems early on which I now know ways in which to deal with them:

Initially I didn't give enough direction, forgetting that they hadn't been involved in the early development and didn't understand the reasons that some of the design decisions were made.

This lack of direction was made much worse because I was mainly communicating via e-mail or Instant messaging. This ended up with a lot of back and forth and a lot of frustration on both sides.

​After getting some guidance from my manager I decided to set up regular conference calls to actually talk to my teammates in Pune and this ironed out a lot of the issues and also freed up time to actually get some development done.

I decided to use Python for the development as there was a lot of other Python developers in the lab which would allow me to seek guidance when I needed it. I didn't take into account that other developers would be working on the project and that they might not have Python experience.

​This lack of experience from my teammates was rather difficult to overcome and there were a lot of large code reviews early on explaining exactly why we do certain things, like string formatting for example:

print "This is my string with a variable: {}".format(my_variable)

print "This is my legacy string with a variable: %d" % my_variable

These small differences along with issues with different people using different tab lengths and not using space-tabs caused the reviews to grow a lot.

After doing a few of these code reviews and also talking to my team via the regular conference calls these issues soon ironed out. I also made it mandatory that all my team must run pylint code analysis before submitting for review. In future I will ensure that all my fellow developers have a style guideline or code analysis application like pylint from the start.

As I was having to do so many large code reviews early on it meant that these would often take me a while to do. I started off doing these code reviews in the morning, as Pune are five and a half hours ahead of us this meant that they were already half way through their next day when I would get to doing the code reviews. 

I started doing code reviews as soon as the team had them for me, this would mean I could get it reviewed and comments back to them to address in their morning before I got to work. I would then use evenings whilst they were offline to do my own development work.

​This was only a small change but it made the team much more fluid and allowed us to get more tasks done sooner.

So all in all I've learnt a lot, I've now got more skills in Python, Flask and various other frameworks. What I think is more important is that I've learnt how to lead a team much better and I think any future projects would go much more smoothly now that I've learnt these lessons, even if I had to learn them the hard way. I still think I am far from a great leader but I'm a lot closer than I was before this project.

​Cheers :)

Whilst trawling the gamedev.net developer journals for inspiration, I stumbled across a post that someone had done as a reflection of what he had achieved from the previous year and what his plan was for 2016. I thought this was an amazing idea so I'm going to do it myself. Hopefully this should give me some motivation to finish things off and also some direction with what I want to learn next. So here goes...

Just looking back at my posts from last January I was at that point still developing the in's and out's of my Entity Component System. I had only just implemented Awesomium and was still working on my "Level Editor" for this amazing game I was one day going to make. If I could have given myself some advice It would have been to give up on the Level Editor and the ECS and condense my project down massively. Unfortunately I had to learn the hard way!

I managed to get the ECS working in the end and I am fairly happy with the implementation as it uses some complex patterns (CRTP, Observer) to achieve what it does. Also I learnt a lot about using templates in C++.  

The Level Editor and the original game idea I scrapped although that wasn't until June when I decided to get a fresh project and integrate the new ECS into it. I suppose I can put this down to a learning exercise.

It was August 8th when I decided to create a "Space Invaders Remake" using the new baseline JBEngine and ECS. Since then this project had come a long way and is now approaching the finishing up and polish stage. I am really impressed with the work I have done on this. Whilst working on this game I have had to re-work/refactor a lot of the physics code in JBEngine, which is something that can now be reused in future projects. 

I have come a very long way in terms of my career since the beginning of last year! I had just started out at Inspired Gaming and although I knew I had lot's of knowledge about programming, I still felt as though I was a junior developer. ​

I went through a big change in terms of adapting to a new codebase after being so used to working with Arden's monster of a codebase. Learning an application's flow and the architecture is something that only comes through practice, and working at Inspired gave me that. Some of the key skills I will take away from Inspired are:

• Proficiency with Visual Studio
• Better Multi-Threading Knowledge
• Visualising Program Architecture
• Working on a single project through Requirements/Design/Implementation/Test and Deployment
• Working closely with Project Managers/StakeHolder and Testers.
• Time Management​

Along with the technical skills I have developed much more socially, being able to join a new team and integrate quickly. Joining a new company is difficult but as long as you put in that extra effort at the start to socialise, it makes your job and your life much more enjoyable. I have made some great friends at Inspired and will hopefully be seeing them soon in 2016.

In June of this year I left Inspired Gaming and joined IBM. At the time I was very fearful of this decision as the role was to work as C Developer rather than C++ which I had been doing in my previous jobs. To me this felt like a step back in terms of gathering skills but I also have always wanted to work for one of the Big Blue's so I went for it. I think having one of the industry giants such as IBM on my CV couldn't hurt either.

Whilst working at IBM I have actually only done a small amount C development. Instead I pushed for the opportunity to work on a newly starting project which has required me to use python.

I have learnt a lot since being at IBM specifically more about hardware, networking, storage and virtualisation. A lot of the things I have learnt is how much of a nuisance it can be working for a massive corporation. Having company wide decisions pushed on you when it is not the correct decision for your situation. Here is a list of the technical skills I have learned since being at IBM: 

• Learning to various Linux distributions
• ssh'ing onto various machines and having to perform tasks using the command-line only
• Using Eclipse
• RTC (Rational Team Concert)
• python, with Flask, SQLAlchemy and virtual env
• Using Virtual Machines
• Connecting Hardware/Server Room knowledge
• People Management/Project Management skills
• Program Design

The list could go on and on! The main piece of work that I have worked on at IBM I have been the lead developer on. This has required me to create a design document, providing a solution that we will then implement. I have also had to give direction to and collaborate with a team of 3-6 other developers to allow them to accomplish what is in the design.

I have once again had to integrate myself into another team, this one being now up to 80 people. This has been fairly easy as the work environment at the IBM Manchester Lab is really friendly. I have already made some great friends and feel as though I am now an integral part of the team.

In terms of my living arrangements I have moved flat and I am going to be moving again shortly. I moved from Manchester's Northern Quarter in February of 2015 to a flat just off Deansgate Locks. This has given me the opportunity to see more of the city. Some great bars for the summer like Duke's 92, Rain Bar, Atlas bar and many amazing restaurants.

​For the past year I have been in a relationship with Megan (Megatron). We have had some amazing experiences together already! Going for long weekend breaks to Chester, Grasmere, Windermere. A great holiday in Portugal, going to see Wicked! and a lot of hilarious nights out. I can't wait for the adventures we will be having next year!

In terms of my fitness, whilst being at IBM I've managed to maintain my enthusiasm for going to the gym, and playing squash. I now enjoy playing Table Tennis almost every day at work and playing Football on Monday nights.

So all in all this year has been an amazing one for my career, social life, projects and personal development. I realise this post is now pretty long so I think I will leave the "What's Next" part to be a separate post.

Happy New Year :)

I just wanted to put a quick post up about some prototyping I am doing at work. I have been given the task of creating a dummy web application which has taken me into a realm I am not familiar with at all so I thought I would talk about it a little. 

I basically had total control over what technology I used for this application and someone suggested to use Perl as people had used it for other application we have. I really didn't want to use Perl and there is a couple of reasons for this:

1. If I have to learn a new language I would rather it be one that I like the look of
2. I would rather learn one that is becoming more popular rather than one that is dying off.
3. There are a few people in work that are willing to help with this little prototype and they have more expertise with python.
4. Python has SQLAlchemy which supports both database types we will need to use.

I will now talk a little bit about the other choices I have made in terms of tech: 
I've decided to use Flask as it is a lightweight web framework which will allow me to do exactly what I need. This web application isn't complex so I didn't really want something large and all encompassing.

As the Web application has to use DB's I've decided to use SQLAlchemy as it seems fairly popular, has support for MySQL(The Test DB I am using for this) but also support for DB2(What we will likely deploy it on). 

Finally virtualenv. This is something I've never used before but it seems like it is going to be really useful as deployment to other machines can be done without worry as It won't matter about them having the correct python version or flask version installed. 

All in all it's been great, I've had to learn a lot so far and I'm finally getting the hang of how it all fits together. I've been lucky enough to have another application to use for guidance through this development and so I should have it up and running in no time.

So I haven't done any dev for a week or so, this is a combination of being putting a lot of time into work at the moment and also because I've just got a new computer.

I initially was in more of a test role at work but after a bit of pushing and a little bit of extra hard work I've managed to get myself as part of the dev team on one of the new projects which is great. I have had to learn a lot more over the past week or so to do with IBM's specific development tools and about their processes.

I am currently at the design phase of a new project and it is great as I'm getting to be involved with the meetings with system architects and getting to add sections to the main design document. At the moment there is a lot of prototyping and trying out various methods and tools to see what could work so it is all very fluid and quite fun.

At home I've just put together my new computer which ended up taking a while as I didn't realise that I would need a fresh install of Windows 7 (as the drivers would be different in the new mobo) and forgot to create a boot disc before ripping the thing apart.

Anyway after doing a fresh install I have now got to reinstall most of my development tools and do a load of windows updates, and basically get everything back to how it was. sigh.....

The positive is that it is really quick! And it will be even quicker once I've bought a new GFX card.

As another point, with spending so much time on Linux at work I have decided to use my other hard drive for a Ubuntu Install. I am hoping to one day get the JBEngine up and running on Linux, It is quite a long way off but I've used all cross platform libraries so far so the work shouldn't be too difficult.

Anyway going forward I basically need to get Visual Studio installed and then start looking at getting this ECS put into the engine as it's really starting to bug me.

Cheers :)

I'm now about two weeks into my new job and all seems to be going well. Everyone there is much more friendly than I had first thought they would be. I had this image of everyone being a corporate drone and wanting to just get there work done and go home but luckily this isn't the case.

Over the past few weeks I have been doing a lot of training as I really had no real clue about using Linux or even the products that IBM create there. It is all very much all the things I have stayed away from in the past: Networking and hardware. I have really come to grips with it now and I see how it is such a massive industry. At the end of the day even a small business ends up needing to think about some Networking/Storage Solution.

It was my Birthday on Thursday and I was spoilt rotten as always :)

Turning 24 isn't that special though, I was hoping I could be 21 forever but that didn't seem to pan out. Anyway on the Friday my girlfriend Meg treated me to a relaxing night away in Liverpool. We stayed at the amazing Titanic Hotel and we had a great night. The hotel was huge! It is where the Titanic used to dock and they have transformed into this amazing hotel whilst still keeping a lot of the industrial features. We both had such an amazing time there and spent a lot of time relaxing in the spa as you can see from the photo's.

Anyway that sort of sums up what I've been up to. Okay so there wasn't much talk of actual development but this is the first step towards getting some done. I had my desktop unplugged and out the way for a while but I've got it setup now and I'm hoping this post will spark off some motivation. 

My only worry is that because I didn't implement the new ECS system into my engine when I had my head in the code it might now take me a while longer to get it done.

Take it easy :)

Wow it's been a while since I did a blog post. I've really let it slide for quite a while recently and basically it's because I've not been doing any real dev work outside of work. This is a bit annoying but there are a few reasons for this. 

So last post I was talking about the game I was wanting to develop with a couple of other people. I have pretty much given up on this, there were some differences in how the project should be progressed and motivation for it dropped. I have never really had any trouble keeping motivation high for my own projects so that was an indicator for me that it wasn't working. 

I am going to start back up on my JBEngine project which is great as that is really where my interests lie. I may not have as polished a game as I could using a commercial engine but I think a lot of the satisfaction will come from the fact that I've built it all myself. 

That brings me to something else I have been thinking about. I'm going to really reign in the scope of my JBEngine project and try and create a 3D version of a classic arcade game. This will allow me to create a finished game hopefully and then I can polish and have a product that I can actually say I've completed. 

I've just got myself a new job as a Software Developer at the IBM Manchester Lab. I'm pretty damn excited about it and will hopefully be a massive career boost for me. The only thing I'm really nervous about is that they use Linux which I have never used before. This past week I have been getting myself up and running getting used to using Linux for development in preparation for starting on Monday. 

I will be fairly sad to leave Inspired Gaming as it was a really fun job and I got along well with everyone there. I've learnt a lot from the people there, and had much more experience working closely with a tester and project manager than I did at Arden. 

My new job will hopefully bring a lot more experience with it being such a different area to what I'm currently used to. 

I hope to back up and running with regular dev updates soon.

Cheers :)