Code Archives - Sean Robinson Consulting

Dependency Chain modelling

A rusted chain — Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

A dependency chain is where you have a number of functions that all need to do some part of a piece of work in order to fully deliver it. These functions complete their part and then pass it along to another.

In my last article I showed why your IT requests were likely taking so much longer to service than you expected. But what if you have multiple dependencies chained together? How can you get a rough idea of how long something is going to take when you have a disconnected dependency chain rather than an end to end view of the system. In this article, I’ll explain the process of getting a rough statistical idea of how long something is going to take when you have multiple dependencies all linked together. I’ll explain this through an R script, but the concept is easily transferable.

Quick and dirty dependency map automation

horizontal neon lights — Photo by H Shaw on Unsplash

After some of my recent articles on building a dependency map, a few people got in touch asking for tips on actually creating them. Here’s a quick way to get started.

You might have noticed the following example in my previous posts.

I created the graphic above with an amazing bit of kit called Neo4j. It’s actually an incredibly sophisticated graph database technology, so it almost feels a little sacrilegious to be using it for this.

Backing up Atlassian OnDemand

Reason

When somebody wants to backup either the JIRA or Confluence onDemand databases.

Context

Atlassian onDemand does not currently have any features for automating a backup of either JIRA or Confluence. To get around this we can trigger a backup from Atlassian and then automatically download the resulting file to a location of our choosing. We can take this a step further by automating this processes with a cron job on Mac or Unix, or by using Windows Task Scheduler.

Disclaimer

These scripts were based on one given for Jira by Marlon Aguiar of Atlassian, the original can be found here. Some minor modifications were made and a separate script for Confluence was created from the resulting code.

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Sieve of Eratosthenes

I was rummaging around in some old directories and found an implementation of the Sieve of Eratosthenes that I’d thought I’d share. I thought I’d share it because of the simplicity of the algorithm, it represented a very enjoyable programming exercise and one that I now use as a standard kata when learning a new language. The Sieve of Eratosthenes is an algorithm used to identify prime numbers.

In it’s simplest form, the algorithm states:

set Array to array of size N
set Array to all true
for i from 2 to N
  for each j where i divides j, j from i + 1 to N
    set Array(j) to false

Basically, it trawls an array of “on” bits and “turns off” any index that is cleanly divisible by any number less than the square root of it’s size.

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