Our approaches | Read the latest blogs, news and views from Infomentum. (3)

At Infomentum we have successfully moved towards a centralised logged infrastructure where systems, application, network and security logs are parsed and made available in one central point. Using components such as Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, our logging infrastructure provides us the ability to apply filters to perform queries and basic trends analysis or counts.

One of the challenges we faced was shipping Windows Server logs from a logfile onto Logstash’s syslog listener, and we found a tool that does exactly that - nxlog-ce-2.9.1716

Due to the popularity of our previous blog 'Get the most out of Oracle APEX logs' published in January 2018 we decided to continue the Oracle APEX series. Rene Mikami is back with more amazing Oracle APEX  suggestions and tips! 

Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX) is the web application development tool for the Oracle database. We use the tool to design, develop and deploy database-driven applications, either on-premise or in the cloud. Using only a web browser and with limited programming experience, you can rapidly develop and deploy professional applications that are both fast and secure for any device from desktop to mobile.

Part 2: Implementation

In Part 1, we talked about picking the tools for our first foray into the world of headless Content Management System (CMS) architectures, during our project with Fudgelearn. We had other options on our radar, but we decided that WordPress was the CMS that fit in best with our requirements. These were the main ones:

Web development is accelerating at an incredible rate - new frameworks seem to pop up every day. Whilst this is exciting (at least to a front-end geek like me!), it can be difficult knowing which new tools are any good and which ones you should be using.

A few weeks back, I decided to get involved in Java Challenge UK, by sitting on the competition’s jury panel. A bit of context: the Java Challenge is a gamified competition, with one league for professionals and one for students, that consists of multiple-choice questions. As part of the “jury duty”, I had the task of writing one of these questions. I decided to write my question around lambdas; read on to find out a little bit about why...

In my last article, The evolution of test documentation; lessons learned from implementing Cucumber, I explained two things. Firstly, how we at Infomentum have adopted Behaviour-Driven Development to define test scenarios, and secondly, how we use Cucumber JVM as an implementation platform for running these scenarios as automated tests.

A wise man once said "If you are going to dive head-first into DevOps, better pack a parachute". Aside from the fact that this man was me, the point is still valid. 

Infomentum had started maturing into a DevOps culture, which involved the developers using tools normally associated with DevOps to solve development problems. We were calling it DevOps for several years, even though the actual DevOps culture, practices and support were not in place. The changes made were effective at enhancing the development lifecycle, but were completely separate and sliced off from the rest of the organisation. This meant that infrastructure needed to catch up so that the DevOps practices could be fully utilised throughout the company. The major issue with DevOps is that it really is all or nothing; as soon as you have segregated processes and half-utilised technologies, the power of DevOps is completely negated.

Kicking off our new blog series, ‘A Day in the Life of…’ our summer interns, computer science students Pratik Jadhav and Hasan Rafiq, reveal a behind-the-scenes glimpse of an intern’s typical day.

I chose to study computer science because…

Pratik: My dad is in the IT business so it’s something I’ve been interested in from a young age. I love technology and I wanted to understand how everything works, and how to develop everything.

Hasan: Other members of my family are in IT so I always knew about it. At first, I was going to go into dentistry, but I tried it out and I couldn’t see myself looking into other people’s mouths for the rest of my life! So I knew then that I wanted to go into computer science.

The old way

I'm going to let you in on a secret. I learnt my trade in a traditional software testing consultancy - I'm talking a waterfall approach to test planning, test case definition and test scripting. Over the last 5 years at Infomentum, I've evolved and have worked hard to optimise Infomentum's testing practices to suit our agile development environment.