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up71.me (uptime) - An experimental project using React, TypeScript, UX, AWS, and SEO

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I recently created a learning project up71.me which is uptime in LEET encoded speak.  It is a purposefully basic SLA calculation utility with a focus on quality web design.  In large enterprises creating and managing a public site soup to nuts is not possible.  While an SLA calculator is a bit small and trivial it does offer a good simple use case to tinker with. Screenshot of website Why did I pick an SLA calculator for my pet project?  The motivation came out of annoyance.  The top-ranking Google results for SLA calculators/uptime are minimally functional and lack the polish, usability, and performance that can be easily created with a modern set of development tools.  Many things could be improved upon looking at existing SLA pages: faster load time, mobile-optimized, cursor defaults to input element, examples, description, accessibility, multi-lingual, client-side only processing.  Beyond this, I had never tried to beat out an existing set of websites by improving search
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The Technology Architect Organization Quiz - 7 questions to ask before taking the job

The Technology Architect Organization Quiz is a brief set of questions you should ask a potential employer during the interview.  In fact, you should always ask informed questions, after all that is a huge component of an architects job.  Getting a good idea of how a company views, structures, enables architecture is important as there is significant variety.  In some companies architects are looked to as strategic gurus, technology experts, but in others simply quality and design draftsmen, or worse Ivory Tower babblers.  The variety is compounded as there are differences between industries and between Europe and the US.  I have been refining the Technology Architect Organization Quiz for several weeks which and it is in the spirit of  The Joel Test  by Joel Spolsky.  I highly recommend checking out  The Joel Test  as it succinctly provides a good measure for development maturity while remaining simple yes or no questions.  I hope the Technology Architect Organization Quiz is just as
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Configuring Javascript SyntaxHighligher 3+ in a Blogger site

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In this post I tactically outline a quality way to configure the Javascript based SyntaxHighlighter library into a Blogger site. The configuration below makes use of the recent autoloader available in version 3 and greater of the SyntaxHighlighter.  The configuration code below is in fact using the SyntaxHighlighter which incidentally allows you to copy the code examples quickly.  Check out this very popular library here . Configuration: 1.  Login into blogger.com and click/select the site you want to configure ( http://www.blogger.com/home ) to support syntax highlighting.  Generally if there are multiple sites you would like to enable each site's template will need to be configured individually. 2.  Click the Template link from the sidebar of the Blogger Site main page shown below. 3.  Save the template, if you choose, by clicking on Backup/Restore in the upper righthand corner and following the instructions.  Better to be safe rather than sorry if you are not famil
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Here there everywhere...

This site has moved around a couple of times and even lost a little content.  However, I am going to give this another go for a time.  My hope is to make it more of an on-going narrative style to ensure I most more frequently.
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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) - Simple in good and bad times

Now I am biased having just dealt with IBM's MQ product line and the walled garden approach to their tool suite, so I might be over complementary to Amazon AWS SQS .  Okay, one more thing about IBM MQ, just look at the website , tired, old, selfware; some might argue stable, but hype is the name of the game.  On the other hand AWS SQS fresh and simple , by name, approach, use, and in features.  However, I believe there is something simply excellent about that. Simple Setup - I had a queue up and running in 30 seconds.  I clicked on the AWS Management Console tab, a browser/java based tool and entered some stuff in and bam queue.  Then I right clicked on it, snappy, I can write a message to it.  So, again I right clicked on the queue entry listed in the AWS SQS console and found a real-time queue reader/listener, and hey I can even delete messages. Simple Developer Tools - Sure enough I flip over to the eclipse based tools and as expected I could access the queues from there
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UML supports the MDD process: No match made in heaven or oxymoron.

This post builds on previous posts ( 1 , 2 ) and is serves as additional commentary and context to a post by   Franco Civello -  UML for MDD - Oxymoron or match made in heaven?   Not sure what Model-Driven Development (MDD) is exactly, then check out IBM's MDD Redbook which is one perspective. UML is a modeling language with thousands of features and facets.  Most people discount UML, even experienced modelers and language developers, without understanding what the language is capable off.  The primary UML feature missed of importance here is the UML Profiles capability.  People miss that UML Profiles allow for extension and constraints of the language itself, read section 18 of the UML Superstructure or take a look at the UML profile catalog .  The two linked posts ( 1 , 2 ) speak to what UML profiles are etc, so you might consider reading them before proceeding.  This extension and constraint mechanism is exactly what is needed to create domain specific models i.e. support MDD
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Reference Cards, Cheat Sheets, Posters, whatever they are called.

Tonight I tried to find quick reference sheets for both UML and BPMN, free of course.  There are quite a fewer different terms for them be it poster, reference cards, cheat sheets, quick guides etc.  However, once I got into several sites by searching for "Reference Cards" I found the other names for these small printable guides to various technologies. Oh yes, and much more managable or likely to be used than " pocket references " which don't fit in your pocket. List of quality sites quick guides: refcardz.dzone.com itPoster.net (singular) cheat-sheets.org scribd.com/ (kind of) I did not find a suitable quality UML guide ( Stackoverflow has a list ), but the BPMN poster  at itPoster.net though outdated at time of this post was still really well done. There are several red herring links which get referenced a lot, but are not that good, ex: ( How are you to carry this around? ) Any other good sites that have a listing of printable reference guides?
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