A guide to how to succeed at any workplace
We software developers always want to grow professionally. First of all, this is our internal driver, our curiosity to explore new things. We learn new technologies not because somebody told us to but because we want to. And, to be completely honest, in such a fast-paced world, it is hard not to catch up with the latest updates. You can’t master something and simply stick to it forever; information technologies are improving every year, and therefore we also have to.
Yet not everyone is able to apply new learnings. Being in the industry for some time, I have discovered that…
Lessons to succeed as an online instructor
Teaching was always my passion. I enjoy explaining technologies and approaches to students, junior developers, and everybody curious about it. Different technical conferences and meetups were the main places for me to practice explaining material.
Then pandemic came. All conferences either got canceled or became online events. Along with that, there is a boom in online learnings. The demand started to grow, everybody tries to use lockdown as a time to acquire new knowledge. If you ever thought about making your own video course, then it is your chance.
I released my first video course a few months ago and…
Explaining a complex concept in simple words
Graph databases are not a new concept. Graph theory was actively developed in the 1960s and since then the first attempts for building storage for graph structures have already appeared. The general idea is to persist the graph as a data structure and operate with it through the queries. It is like a mixture of graphs and databases, taking the best parts of both of them.
The main driver for graph databases was the expansion of social networks and the improvements of recommendation engines. …
Let’s optimize your resources to maximize benefits
These days it is hard to find a digital business that hasn’t moved to the cloud. Cloud computing is getting more and more new users, infrastructure is growing, more services are offered. There is a chance to find anything for your business needs. And Amazon Web Services remain the leader as a cloud computing platform.
Over time you might see that your bill is increasing. Cloud platforms are not cheap enough yet. Computational power with its awesomeness still is too precious. Software engineers have to carefully evaluate and calculate the expected load. Based on that, they need to select the…
The biggest mistakes I made in my career — and what I learned
We like reading success stories. New achievements, innovations, big sales, outstanding performance — all of this inspires us. Success stories demonstrate that nothing is impossible. If we look around, we will see that many things are the result of someone's victory. What is missing though is the way it was achieved.
Behind every result, there is a combination of different events: attempts, failures, rethinking. We don’t realize that. We don’t talk about failures; they can be uncomfortable and embarrassing. However, without the mistakes we made, we wouldn’t reach the goal. Failures are natural, and we need to accept that fact…
Utilize cloud capabilities to the maximum
In 2021 Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 200 various services. Some of them you could be already familiar with; others look relatively fresh. There is no doubt that each of them serves its purpose. Some services might even impress you and lead to the impression “I can’t imagine there is service for that.” Personally, I was amazed when I discovered Amazon Lumberyard.
At the same time, there are solid “rock star” services that have been around for quite some time. They have been proven by time and software engineers. With their help, it is possible to build and ship…
WebSockets and long polling are good, but here’s a better alternative
Have you ever experienced a situation where your frontend application had to receive some updates and refresh its user interface accordingly? One example is observing a long-running task on the server and checking the logs in real-time. Or it can be watching financial or sports updates. It has to be a one-way communication channel between the client and the server.
Let’s explore how to achieve that.
Discovery
Multiple ideas might be popping up now. We could achieve that with WebSockets. While this approach sounds reasonable, it looks like an overhead. WebSockets is a full-duplex protocol over a TCP connection. It is…
Discover how to handle network traffic efficiently
When you have a single-page website as a visit card, things look pretty good. There are no issues serving all users and it remains available all time. But the situation changes dramatically if you have a big system — especially with increased traffic.
In the beginning, we assumed that it should not be an issue with a user base of a few thousand active customers. One day, your website reaches a turning point where it cannot effectively process all requests. The number of active users is growing. Everybody gets excited about growth. However, now engineers have to figure out how…
Get more knowledge in a limited time
The pandemic boosted online education. Students and universities were forced to move online. Many people had a lot of free time and decided to learn something new. Cooking, programming, online marketing, psychology — those are only a few of the demanding topics from online classes. Everybody is eager to discover a new topic for themselves.
At the same time, not everybody is able to remember what they learned. We tend to watch a course before going to bed instead of a new episode on Netflix — and this becomes mistake number one. Probably we will remember something, but most likely…
Making the Internet a safe and friendly place to be
In a digital era, sitting comfortably on a chair in a private space, people can become braver than they really are. This can lead to inappropriate behavior from their side and in some cases have a negative impact on society. Vulnerabilities in systems allow bad behaviors, and software engineers have to react fast to eliminate them.
This is not a new issue, it is there almost from the beginning of the Internet. Therefore, the methods to resolve it not only available but constantly improving. Certain techniques were not there because the technologies were not advanced enough back in time. With…
