Hi I'm Juan! I'm a software developer from Argentina 🇦🇷living in the Bay Area.
On this blog I share the things I learn on software development and other related topics.
It’s Monday morning. You’re sitting at your desk with your steaming cup of Joe, ready to sink your teeth into that new feature you have to develop. The git pull downloads months worth of changes, and you dive into the code. Piece by piece, you start building a mental model of the system, trying to make sense of the different components. But something doesn’t feel right. Why was it built this way? It feels weird, it feels so obviously wrong, so poorly designed, so suboptimal.
You realize you need help. Whoever wrote this mess should be able to provide some context. You run git blame and your own name hits you in the face like a brick. You start thinking that maybe it’s no so wrong. That you probably had your reasons. If you could only go back in time and ask your past self…
What we include in a test is as important as what we leave out. Having the right amount of information helps us understand what the test is doing at a glance.
Flaky tests are those that randomly fail for no apparent reason. If you have a flaky test, you might re-run it, over and over, until it succeeds. If you have a couple of them, the chances of all passing at the same time are slim, so maybe you ignore the failures. You know, just this one time… Soon enough, you’re not paying attention to failures on this test suite. Congratulations! Your tests are now worthless.
Queues are a powerful tool for building reliable systems. In this article, I’ll describe some of the tips and tricks I came across when working with queues.
Some of the advice is specific to Amazon SQS queues because that’s what I’ve been using the most lately. And also because some of them come from this amazing article from the Amazon Builders’ Library.
We have deluded ourselves into thinking that being able to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard is the hallmark of great software engineering. It’s time we look for better ways of evaluating coding skills.
