Feb 4, 2020Programming languages diversity“Company XXX announced they are switching from programming language YYY to ZZZ”, quite a typical story in twitter, or many tech-startup newsfeeds. Why so much attention is paid to that and why should the company, at least VC-backed, having sometimes a few hundred developers, switch from one programming language to…Programming Languages3 min readProgramming Languages3 min read
Sep 18, 2019DevOps: it’s all about responsibility (and just a little tech)DevOps is, for sure, one of the buzzwords of the decade. Though neither practitioners nor academics have come to any good definition of DevOps so far, it’s quite clear from the name itself — the naive definition “we build it, we run it”. In other words, it’s the responsibility shift…DevOps3 min readDevOps3 min read
Jun 19, 2019The “Backend For Frontend” pattern in distributed event-driven systemsAs your project evolves, you find out you need different data at different points in time from your web-app, your android app, and your iOS app. Even more, the new versions of your mobile apps, with completely different flows, might require a completely new APIs to communicate with your backend. …Microservices3 min readMicroservices3 min read
Dec 17, 2018Kafka hands-on. Part II: producing and consuming messages (in Python)So now we have our development Kafka cluster up and running as we’ve set it up in the first part. Now it’s time to produce and consume some messages. As you already know, producing a message in Kafka means sending a message to a broker to be appended to a…Kafka4 min readKafka4 min read
Nov 22, 2018Enabling mocks from command-line (with py.test)To mock or not to mock? — Mocking is a well-known technique used in different levels of testing, mostly unit-testing, and is usually achieved via either patching or dependency injection. There are certain situations, however, when you want your integration tests to switch some mocks on and off. Nearly everyone had a monolith. Spaghetti code, hard database…Software Development2 min readSoftware Development2 min read
Nov 10, 2018Kafka hands-on. Part I: development environmentThe simplest way to get your Kafka cluster up and running on your workstation — The best way to learn new technology is to start working with it, right? So let’s first of all get Apache Kafka running on your workstation. You’ll need Docker, docker-compose, some disk space, and internet connection. We will use Kafka Docker images from https://www.confluent.io/. Kafka is not for absolute beginners…Docker4 min readDocker4 min read
Aug 6, 2018Collaboration noiseConcentration, or, at least, no distractions, is essential for many professions. Quite often it is referred only to “programmers”, while it applies to all of engineers, researchers, and — generally — to every “white collar”, if the job does not require constant interaction with others. Many studies show how long…Productivity3 min readProductivity3 min read
May 5, 2018Using docker multi-stage builds for deploying front-endWhile Docker was originally used mostly by back-end developers, and first of all for deploying microservices, it’s currently gaining popularity among front-end developers as well. Nowadays front-end applications are usually “single-page apps”, either fully client-side or utilizing hybrid techniques with server-side rendering. Independently of how will it be served —…Docker2 min readDocker2 min read
Jan 12, 2017Never too old (to rock’n’roll and code)During last couple of years many software developers wrote about “aging” and, generally, “what shall I do (when I’m 64)”. I’ve been asked by a few younger friends and co-workers to express my take on it and how do I feel working together with much younger developers. The IT industry…Programming3 min readProgramming3 min read
