Coding forest

Working With Queues

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.

The Whiteboard Interview Is Broken

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.

How to Craft Effective Presentations

This is a compilation of all the things I learned for creating effective presentations.

Hexagonal Architecture on Spring Boot

In this article, I’ll show how to implement a Spring Boot application using Hexagonal Architecture.

Book Recommendations: Shape Up

I love reading about how people do creative work. Be it writing books or designing video games, there’s something magical about peeking behind the curtain and learning how the pros do their thing.

Today I’m reviewing Shape Up, a book about the process of writing software at Basecamp.

Book Recommendations: The Advantage

Today I’m reviewing The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. A book written for leaders looking to build a healthy organization.

Graphic Design Tools for Backend Engineers

You might think that being a backend engineer means you’ll never have to draw anything more complex than a bunch of boxes connected with arrows (or hexagons if are going all cloud native). This is simply not true, and that’s why you’re here.

At some point you’ll find yourself producing system diagrams, flow-charts, slides, mockups, maybe even icons! So, let me show you some tools and tricks I picked up over the years to fake it at design.

Mockk All the Things

Over the last few years Mockk has been gaining ground as the go-to mocking library in KotlinWorld ™. Just recently, it was listed as “adopt” in the ThoughtWorks technology Radar. Want to know what all the fuss is about?

Different Kinds of Channels in Kotlin

Overview of the different kinds of Kotlin channels and their behaviors.

SQS Consumer Using Kotlin Coroutines

Today we’ll see how to write a SQS consumer that processes messages in a parallel, non-blocking way, using Kotlin coroutines.