Blogs

I’ve been working fully remotely since 2021. This was something that I always wanted to try out/do since I recognized that being a parent and consultant travelling a lot was not aligning with my vision of the kind of dad I would like to be. I’ve talked to friends who embraced that idea (moving out of a big city, back to a smaller place where they’ve grown up, enjoying old friendships and different sense of community), read books (“Remote / Office not required”) and followed companies (e.g. GitLab) that went really big on remote before the whole pandemic made it a norm (for a “short” time). I also liked the idea that I didn’t restrict myself only to working for companies that are present where I live. ...

It’s been a while, huh!? I think my writing comes in waves. This time what inspired me, was rediscovering the blog of a buddy of mine, Ham and binge-reading the posts that I’ve missed in recent years. While reading it, and seeing that Ham is not limiting himself only to technical bits, I started thinking how much pleasure writing gives me… So after re-dusting my whole hugo+github setup (read: sinking few hours in updating it), I finally got to press some keys to create a Now page - also inspired by Ham’s blog and the discovery of the concept of a now page. Go there to read about my current setup and what is currently on my mind.

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 fall 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 general, 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. ...