I am an Excel monkey. What do monkeys have to do with pandas? If you are like me and tend to solve all problems that involve data and numerical calculation in Excel, you must have come across a dreaded moment in your life in which you had to decide between cleaning the data from scratch every time there was a change, writing a cryptic nested set of functions, or…. (drum roll) writing a VBA script.

These are the best statements I heard (or were shown on slides but not necessary verbalised) during the Cloud Native 2018 conference held between Wednesday, 26th and Friday, 28th September at CodeNode, London.

In the process of configuring a StatefulSet for Memcached, I’ve discovered that my biggest hurdle had to do with my inability to grasp the exact order of events that take place in a Pod’s life cycle.

Every application proposal trying to win the heart of a Fortune 500 company today not only needs to claim to be Agile—oh, sorry, SAFe—but also based on a microservices architecture. After high-profile microservices disasters like Dell’s, we understand that a myopic microservices approach may not end up well. What if we could have all the benefits of a microservices architecture but none of the drawbacks?

Why, sometimes, you should just stick to boxes.

A toxic combination.

When I first started tinkering with Java in 1996, I was less than impressed at how sluggish the JVM was and how Java Applet-powered sites would be crippled by an annoying, CPU-hogging, grey rectangle. But, it was a miracle nevertheless. I was running Linux and Windows on x86, my job’s machine was a DEC Alpha (RISC) and some friends were Mac users (68k and PowerPC). Java ran in all of these platforms; so did Perl scripts, of course, but that’s another story.

The story goes that one day in the winter of 1928, Joe Kennedy stopped to have his shoes shined and when the boy finished, he offered him a stock tip: “Buy Hindenburg”. Kennedy sold off his stocks right after after concluding: “You know that it is a time to sell when shoeshine boys give you stock tips. This bull market is over”. This was just before the Great Depression.

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it; the saying goes. Many organisations are still paying the price for vendor lock-in and struggling to get out of “enterprise” platforms such as WebLogic, WebSphere and TIBCO, as they desperately try to break down their monoliths and become cloud native.

I was thinking about Fermat’s Little Theorem and I wondered whether this primality test could be used to generate prime numbers faster than the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which is typically used to market Haskell to imperative programmers.