Blogs

Back in 2013, I was building a system to help with pediatric kidney transplant research while also trying to write a PhD at the same time. That split did not work out. I liked building the system and the team around it way more than writing papers and the dissertation work itself. Still, it took me a while though to actually acknowledge that. To allow myself to say: I like the one thing more than the original goal. But finally I did and decided to focus exactly on this: building tech, building teams, learning how to do it better and to do a lot of that. ...

Java/JVM ecosystem is extremely mature and vast. It comes with a palette of production-ready choices for libraries solving problems that we face developing all kinds of services: be it from logging/metrics to async messaging or access to all the major sql and nosql data stores. Add the big talent pool (Java is very often used as the programming language used during CS-courses)[1] and it’s no wonder that this particular language and ecosystem is on the top or among the top 5 in the programming language statistics [2][3]. ...

I ordered the UHK with the linux layout as I thought that I will be moving towards a linux laptop as the main driver for my work. Somehow this didn’t happen :confused: and therefore I ended up using the UHK with a Mackbook Pro. Thus, I changed few settings and love my setup even more. UHK is really a spectacular keyboard. I quickly decided to just align the Fn, Ctrl, Option and Cmd key with the mac layout so that my mussle memory doesn’t suffer too much. This also made me fell in love with the UHK agent: It’s just so easy to remap the keys to your liking. ...

I figured it’s time to write up the quickest guide about using the yubikey as the source of your ssh key. This assumes that: You have a yubikey and it’s in your usb port You’ve configured gpg on you machine (I’m running gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.7) You’re using the gpg-agent with enabled ssh support Here are the steps: gpg --card-edit > admin > generate > [enter the requested PIN] > quit And now you’re done. You can check if the new ssh key get pulled correctly from your yubikey typing: ...

As you can see looking at the frequency of my posts, I’m more of an occasional writer. Therefore whenever I drag myself in front of my notebook, to write something up I’m feeling like sharing, I should really not have any reason to do something else instead. Sadly, although I was really happy with my octopress setup, more than once I found myself fighting the currently installed ruby versions and some conflicts with the gems that octopress was requiring. ...

A while ago I wrote a ThoughtWorks insights post about the Backends for frontends pattern and the story behind its adaption at SoundCloud. It generated interesting discussions and resulted also in some further content and I thought it would be good to have a place with links to all this resources for the future reference. BFF @ SoundCloud - the original post talking about the pattern and journey towards it BFF pattern definition - comprehensive pattern definition Moving to Microservices at SoundCloud - Software Engineering Daily podcast - a podcast talking about microservices in gerneral, SoundCloud’s journey towards this style of architecture and usage of BFFs BFF @ SoundCloud (podcast) - an interview about UI composition in a microservices world in general and the BFF pattern

After we managed to set up our basic web application, let’s get our hands dirty writing some code. And as we want to do it in a test-driven manner (TDD), we need a proper test setup. This piece is all about our initial test pyramid. Test, what? Yes, pyramid: At the base of the test automation pyramid is unit testing. Unit testing should be the foundation of a solid test automation strategy and as such represents the largest part of the pyramid. (…) Automated user interface testing is placed at the top of the test automation pyramid because we want to do as little of it as possible. (…) Testing through the user interface like this is expensive and should be minimized. Although there are many test cases that need to be invoked, not all need to be run through the user interface. And this is where the service layer of the test automation pyramid comes in. - Mike Cohn https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/the-forgotten-layer-of-the-test-automation-pyramid ...

Together with few friends we started building pace - a web application for organizing and managing running events & competitions. We are a colorful bunch of people with different backgrounds, therefore we wanted to choose an approachable tech stack, as some of us wants also to learn one or two things about JavaScript, web applications or programming in general. And then, somebody suggested to write one thing or two, about our technology decisions and accompany it with some HowTo information. So here we are. ...

During my last four projects or so, the teams I worked with were always using GO.CD as the CD tool of their choosing. Although the pipeline state visualisation GO.CD comes with is quite nice, it still doesn’t cut it as a proper, obvious build monitor enabling everybody in the team to quickly recognize what is the pipeline status. Burstah in action Therefore first cidar, a simple sinatra based build monitor, has been born. I quickly discovered that sinatra and especially the nokogiri dependency, doesn’t make it easy to use e.g. a Raspberry Pi as the monitor hardware. So, having the liberty, I decided to re-implement everything in JavaScript using node.js & express. Burstah , my second attempt at the ultimative build monitor, has been born :grin: ...

Last Thursday I was a part of the Scoopcamp hackathon and it was so great that I just couldn’t resist to write down some of my thoughts about it. Our team ThoughtWorks and friends a colorful mix of journalists, students and developers had a rough idea for a modern - more agile - journalism, where the journalist reporting about an ongoing event writes the background story and live updates from his perspective, but can also incorporate content written by the readers who create their own streams representing their own take on the particular event. Being able to see which stream/entry is getting most likes (=feedback), he/she can quickly react and focus on the currently favorite perspective. During a quick brainstorming we came up with the name: LiquidPub (for liquid publishing) and started defining the first user stories. Our app To be able to deliver something within less than a day of coding, we went with Ruby on Rails. This gave me the opportunity to finally try out Rails and learn it a bit by pairing with some experienced Ruby/Rails devs. The application itself has been deployed on heroku and being ThoughtWorks we built and deployed it after each push to our github repo using snap-ci - continuous delivery FTW! ...