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...

One of the core themes of the Microservice Architecture book my co-authors and I published with O'Reilly recently is: "Speed and Safety at Scale". Whether you work in a large enterprise or are trying to grow a tiny startup, speed to market is equally crucial. We all operate in a global, highly competitive, digital market...

One of the core tenets of the Microservice Architecture, quoted in the now-classic Lewis and Fowler list, is the principle of: Products not Projects. In brief, this principle explains that "a team should own a product over its full lifetime", where by 'product' we imply an individual microservice. It's a great principle that promotes number...

Every so often I get asked a tough question that goes something like: "so, you are going to break up all your 'backend' into services but your front-end is still going to be a huge monolith?". It's a fair question. Fair enough that it deserves a short post to address it. The main thing to...

Building your First Containers Installing basic Docker tool-set is quite trivial on most platforms. On reasonably new versions of major Linux distributions you can add a repository provided by Docker.com and install Docker in one command from there on. "Reasonably new" means: distributions the kernels of which support LXC. Since MS Windows and Mac OS-X...

It's trivial in Git to see what files haven't yet been added or have changes that haven't been committed yet (git status). However, once you commit the changes – there's no easy command to see all the files that would be pushed to the remote repository if you ran "git push"… or: there wasn't one,...

One of the really great features of Sublime Text editor is that it allows setting syntax-specific color schemes – meaning: you can have a different syntax highlighting colors for your Markdown files as opposed to your Javascript files etc. You can do this, by opening a file of the corresponding type in Sublime and then...