EngineerBetter

Thanks for the TL;DR. I find these magazine-style articles that start with waffle instead of the conclusion very frustrating!

Agreed on both points. I find it interesting that the properties of Bosh are clear strengths when present in other systems; if what Bosh does is so intrinsically good, why didn't it take over the world? Because it's a PITA to use.

That's meant more of a musing than a passive-aggressive complaint BTW. As someone that's scaled the "Bosh learning cliff" I'd like to see it used more widely.

Ha - if it was in 2014, I was probably in the office!

I don't think it's hit version 1.0 yet, which would explain its rough edges. I find it interesting that it shares a lot of philosophies with Bosh.

They are - it's in the GitHub repositories: https://github.com/alphagov/paas-cf/tree/master/concourse

I should prolly mention that I was lucky enough to work with one of the Concourse authors, and also think it is awesome. Every other CI server I've used has induced rage!

You haven't seen that many publicly funded technology projects, I take it? I have as it happens. Ex-colleagues happen to be working on some, which is rather entertaining as some of those involved are particular left-leaning!

Government buying policy has moved to replace the massive SI consultancies that were holding the Government to ransom with nine-figure contracts to support (and deliver) legacy systems (think 00's era EJB nonsense). GDS is part of that move to more modern working practices, and I for one welcome it.

Governments need IT systems. I would prefer they were delivered with open source platforms and agile methodologies.

I'm interested to hear your ideas for an alternative.

(Disclosure: I worked at Pivotal for a bit, as well as a consultancy supplying services to Her Maj's Government)

Yeah, and that's a good call in my book. Concourse + Bosh makes open source CF manageable. I've heard stories of people trying to deploy OS CF without Bosh, and it ending in a world of pain.

I wish Bosh had a better user experience - in fact, I gave a talk alluding to that at CF Summit Berlin. It's got some great qualities missing in other tools, but I dare say most of the folks reading this will never had heard of it. Declarative, convergent, effectively immutable infrastructure-as-code across all the major IaaS providers.

Great to see UK Government IT modernising. Can't wait for HMRC to catch up!

Is this why they bought Mendeley, a document-management start-up who did a lot of data mining on academic papers, including terabytes of Elsevier's?

Hint: probably. I used to work there.

Completely inaccurate for me.

Because people seem to be missing it, here's a quote from the project website:

"sslip.io's primary purpose is to assist developers who need to test against valid SSL certs, not to safeguard content."

It's very clearly stated on the project's website:

"sslip.io's primary purpose is to assist developers who need to test against valid SSL certs, not to safeguard content."

"Although there's no technical reason why you couldn't use the sslip.io SSL key and certificate for your commerce web, we strongly recommend against it: the key is publicly available; your traffic isn't secure."

A handful of games developers I know that have used Oculus Rift complained of sickness after 20 minutes or so. Apparently it's better with recent revisions of the hardware, but to put it in perspective the prior revision had one chap needing to lie down in a dark room he felt so awful!

"Nage" is technique, and the person who applies a technique against an attacker is "tori". If the author can't get this right, I would suspect their understanding of the martial art is somewhat shallow.