Zachary Flower

I like to write

A writing portfolio can be tough to maintain, as links tend to change over time. Instead, I've decided to share a copy of some of my contract work here, as well as some of own personal writing.

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Articles

Leveraging AWS Spot Instances for Continuous Integration

Published October 22, 2015 for Sumo Logic

Automated Continuous Integration (CI), at a high level, is a development process in which changes submitted to a central version control repository by developers are automatically built and run through a test suite. As builds and tests succeed or fail, the development team is then aware of the state of the codebase at a much more granular level, providing more confidence in deployments. While CI is often used primarily on production-ready branches, many implementations run builds and tests on all branches of a version control system, giving developers and managers a high level view of the status of each project in development. The trouble with automated CI is that it typically requires an always-on server or an expensive SaaS product in order to run builds and tests at any given time. In a large development team, this can be prohibitively expensive as a large backlog of commits would require more...

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API Design: A Documentation-first Approach

Published October 19, 2015 for Sumo Logic

What exactly makes a “good” API? That is a question a lot of developers ask when designing their first API. While there are hundreds of resources online, all with differing opinions about what defines “good,” the majority of them share some similar themes. Logical endpoint naming conventions, clear error messaging, accessibility, and predictability are all crucial pieces in any well-designed API. Most importantly, every good API I’ve ever worked with has had clearly written and easily understandable documentation. On the flip side, poor documentation is one of my biggest frustrations with any API I use. A great example of a good API with excellent documentation is Stripe. Any developer who has worked with it can attest to how well written it is. With clearly defined endpoints, transparent error messages, usable examples, a slew of great SDKs, and standards-compliant methodology, Stripe is often used as a reference point for API development....

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Why Vagrant is the Best Developer Environment

Published October 17, 2015 for DZone

When starting a project, working as an individual developer provides a level of development freedom that can get quickly complicated when it is time to grow the team. Once you expand to multiple developers, it is critical to maintain a well-documented and structured development environment. In a poorly architected environment, team members will have different experiences and ideas about software development, which can lead to friction amongst developers. The lack of consistency between the different environments makes fixing bugs and developing features a frustrating experience, and leads to the commonly used “works on my machine” excuse. By contrast, a properly structured and documented development environment keeps everyone on the same page and focused on product instead of constantly trying to get things to work. In addition to a more efficient development team, a structured development environment can drastically decrease the time it takes to onboard a new developer (I’ve personally...

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Who Controls Docker Containers?

Published September 22, 2015 for Sumo Logic

It’s no secret that Development (“Dev”) and Operations (“Ops”) departments have a tendency to butt heads. The most common point of contention between these two departments is ownership. Traditionally Ops owns and manages everything that isn’t direct development, such as systems administration, systems engineering, database administration, security, networking, and various other subdisciplines. On the flipside of the coin, Dev is responsible for product development and quality assurance. The conflict between the two departments happens in the overlap of duties, especially in the case of managing development resources. When it comes to Docker containers, there is often disagreement as to which department actually owns them because the same container can be used in both development and production environments. If you were to ask me, I would say without hesitation that Dev owns Docker containers, but thanks to the obvious bias I have as a developer, that is probably an overly-simplistic viewpoint....

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Choosing the Right Development Environment For You

Published September 10, 2015 for Sumo Logic

When starting a project, working as an individual developer provides a level of development freedom that can get quickly complicated when it is time to grow the team. Once you expand to multiple developers, it is critical to maintain a well-documented and structured development environment. In a poorly architected environment, team members will have different experiences and ideas about software development, which can lead to friction amongst developers. The lack of consistency between the different environments makes fixing bugs and developing features a frustrating experience, and leads to the commonly used “works on my machine” excuse. By contrast, a properly structured and documented development environment keeps everyone on the same page and focused on product instead of constantly trying to get things to work. In addition to a more efficient development team, a structured development environment can drastically decrease the time it takes to onboard a new developer (I’ve personally...

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Zachary Flower

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