A lot has been written about the merits of testing complex systems in production. My favorite is the now-famous presentation: Yes, I Test in Production (And So Do You) by Charity Majors. The main premise of which is that it’s impossible to recreate live (production)-system conditions in pre-production, so pre-production testing is always flawed and...

Since Docker runs natively on Linux, it is usually much easier to install than on Mac or Windows machines. There are, however some quirks and details to be aware of. We cover couple of those in the following blog post. What is the easiest way to get Docker on Ubuntu? Docker is available in apt...

Flask is a very popular framework that is widely used to create APIs in Python. Gunicorn is a WSGI HTTP Server that many use to launch their Python/Flask programs behind a web server. In production use, you are probably launching gunicorn in a daemon-ized mode, with multiple worker threads. Unfortunately, gunicorn does not have an...

About a year ago I blogged about how to turn iPad Pro into a capable coding machine with the help of a remote linux server. Since then several things have happened: New version of iPad Pros were released with the amazing Magic Keyboard that is easier to type on, has trackpad and back-lighting, making iPads...

When Docker4Mac and Docker4Windows came out they were truly revolutionary: bringing the cutting-edge power of Docker to everyday desktop environments most people use. Eventually they started supporting Kubernetes as well and it looked like the world could not be more perfect for a backend web developer, especially those dubbing into microservices. In reality, the day-to-day...

There is a lot to love about the current iPad Pro - super-fast CPU, beautiful screen, a keyboard that doesn’t need to be charged separately, long battery life and wide selection of apps. Using iPad Pro as an everyday computing device is very tempting, but can it replace substitute your laptop if you are doing...

Python is an incredibly expressive language. It’s also extremely fun to code in, once you get hang of its idiomatic ways of succinctly expressing complex expressions. One of my favorite tricks, in Python, is using list comprehensions for things that you would be writing long, boring loops for, in more primitive languages. Let’s consider some...

Visual Studio Code has become an indispensable tool for my daily coding. Largely due to its great performance, design and productivity, but also partly because of the collection of great extensions you can find. As a side note, it’s also fairly easy to write new VS Code extensions if you don’t find what you are...

Yesterday, most Twitter users got a scary notice that their password could have been compromised and the company was asking them to change the password as a precaution: This sparked a wide range of emotions on social media (shocker!), significant number of users being mad at the company and some even questioning the skills of...

Ever since the rise of the AWS Lambda, software engineers have been fascinated by the premise of “just writing code” and not having to worry about the execution or scaling of said code. Since then, the term “serverless” has been coined to describe the new class of solutions. We now have similar implementations from other...

Kubernetes is probably the most popular container-orchestration system, currently. It was originally developed and eventually open-sourced by Google. Kubernetes competes with the likes of Swarm, DC/OS and AWS’s ECS. Kubernetes is a complex ecosystem of various software components that is actually quite non-trivial to put together. It can be a great way of orchestrating containers...

Please note: the described process should be virtually identical for the Docker for Windows users, but I unfortunately don’t own a Windows and can’t test it. Any comments would be greatly appreciated, if somebody wants to try this approach on a Windows. Docker for Mac is a great way of using Docker on a modern...

Disclaimer In this post we specifically discuss usage of JSON Web Tokens (JWT, pronounced “jot”) with OAuth2. JWTs can certainly be used without OAuth2, by utilizing any other authentication method (e.g. Basic Auth over HTTPS), but in this opinionated post we assume OAuth2 is usually a preferred method for performing API client authentication and are...

While discussing Microservices best practices, questions about message queues comes up often. Specifically, a question I have been asked many times is whether it is OK for multiple microservices to access a shared message queue. This is a fair and important question. In general, sharing data by multiple microservices decreases independent deployability of those microservices...

In a recent post we discussed how Microservice Architecture is fundamentally all about avoiding need for coordination and that all of its other often-cited principles are essentially derivatives of this fundamental goal. One such important, Microservices principle is: avoiding shared libraries and binary coupling. If you haven’t already, you should watch Ben Christensen’s wonderful talk...