Hi ! This is my personal page and blog. You will
find here some articles or projects I'm involved in and a few thoughts (mainly about IT).
I design, code and integrate large IT projects. I like to work in agile environments to bring as much value as possible to my customers, while dealing with budgets and timelines. My main current positions are Software and infrastructure architect on the first side of the coin, DevOps engineer on the other. I also teach various IT subjects including architecture at the university of Nantes (France).
Last technical articles :
As a Product Owner (PO), your role is crucial in steering an agile project towards success. However, it's equally important to be aware of the pitfalls that can lead to failure. In this blog post, we'll explore the actions that should be avoided to ensure your agile project stays on track and delivers valuable outcomes. It's worth noting that the GIGO (Garbage In - Garbage Out) effect is a significant factor: no good product can come from bad design.
On Agile and Business Design Skills
Lack of Design Methodology Awareness
One of the initial steps towards failure is disregarding...
In this article, I'll refer to a 'job' as a batch processing program, as defined in JSR 352. A job can be written in any language but is scheduled periodically to automatically process bulk data, in contrast to interactive processing (CLI or GUI) for end-users. Error handling in jobs differs significantly from interactive processing. For instance, in the latter case, backend calls might not be retried as a human can respond to errors, while jobs need robust error recovery due to their automated nature. Moreover, jobs often possess higher privileges and can potentially damage extensive...
Datasets staticity level
[Article also published on DZone.]
A common challenge when designing applications is determining the most suitable implementation based on the frequency of data changes. Should a status be stored in a table to easily expand the workflow? Should a list of countries be embedded in the code or stored in a table? Should we be able to adjust the thread pool size based on the targeted platform?
In a current large project, we categorize datasets based on their staticity level, ranging from very static to more volatile:
Level 1 : Very static datasets
These types of data changes always involve business...
Architecture as Code with C4 and Plantuml
(This article has also been published at DZone)
Introduction
I'm lucky enough to currently work on a large microservices-based project as a solution architect. I'm responsible for designing different architecture views, each targeting very different audiences, hence different preoccupations:
- The application view dealing with modules and data streams between them (targeting product stakeholders and developers)
- The software view (design patterns, database design rules, choice of programming languages, libraries...) that developers should rely upon;
- The infrastructure view (middleware, databases, network connections, storage, operations...) providing useful information for integrators and DevOps engineers;
- The sizing view dealing with performance;
- The security...
Designing Human-Targeted Random IDs
Article also published on DZone.
ℹ️ NOTE We don't deal here with technical ID used as primary keys in relational databases. See my previous article here if you seek a great way to generate them.
Context
During one of my recent projects, I have been asked to design a scheme of IDs highly usable by humans. The business requirement was mainly to create pseudo-random values that can't be inferred or guessed in order to be used as a secret token printed on some official documents for future controls.
Later on, we had a similar requirement with lower security concerns: generating...
(This article has been also published at DZone)
How to Do UUID as Primary Keys the Right Way
TL;DR: UUID V4 or its COMB variant are great to mitigate various security, stability, and architectural issues, but be aware of various pitfalls when using them.
Why Do We Need Technical IDs in the First Place?
Any properly designed relational database table owns a Primary Key (PK) allowing you to uniquely and stably identify each record. Even if the primary key can be composite (built of several columns), it is a widespread good practice to dedicate a special column (often named id or...
(This article has been also published at DZone)
In most organizations, developers are not allowed to access the production environment for stability, security, or regulatory reasons. This is a quite good practice (enforced by many frameworks like COBIT or ITIL) to restrict access to production but a major drawback is a mental distance created between developers and the real world. Likewise, the monitoring is usually only managed by operators and very little feedback is provided to developers except when they have to fix application bugs (ASAP, of course). As a matter of fact, most developers have...
Four years after the first release of a template in French, we release a revisited English version.
This architecture template is applicable to most management IT projects, regardless of the general architecture chosen (monolithic, SOA, micro-service, n-tier, …). It has already been used on several important projects including large organizations. It is maintained on a regular basis.
Discover it at GitHub.
(This article has also been published at DZone)
TL;DR
In Java, do:
String normalizedString = Normalizer.normalize(originalString,Normalizer.Form.NFKD)
.replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]", "").toLowerCase().replaceAll("\\s{2,}", " ").trim();
Nowadays, most strings are Unicode-encoded and we are able to work with many different native characters with diacritical signs/accents (like ö, é, À) or ligatures (like æ or ʥ). Characters can be stored in UTF-8 (for instance) and associated glyphs can be displayed properly if the font supports them. This is good news for cultural specificities respect.
However, we often observe recurring difficulties when comparing strings issued from different information systems and/or initially typed by humans.
Human brain is a machine...