As some of you know, I’ve spent recently a few months in Dubai. While there, thanks to the friends I made there and thanks to the Endeavor network I came in contact with a lot of local tech companies and startups. The techie in me was very curious about the ecosystem so I had quite […]
I use RxJava a lot nowadays — back in the day before I joined Netflix I was struggling with it a bit and mostly watched from the sideline but nowadays I find myself pulling in that dependency in a lot of the Java code I’m writing. And I also use the Spock framework a lot […]
This is an obvious one but I find myself so often using it and every single time it means I have to spend extra time debugging my test / code until I realize that I’ve fallen for the same mistake again. I’m using RxJava here and using Groovy and Spock framework for testing — and […]
When dealing with OOP languages, composition over inheritance has been the preferred approach for a while now as it offers a greater flexibility in most cases. Before you start, I’m not going to get into that dispute whether one should opt for inheritance or not, enough to say that there are cases where composition is […]
I recently had the chance to reflect over how important jargon can be when building a product and I thought I’d share my thoughts and findings here. A bit of history: a while back (quite a while back now) I helped a small startup (let’s call them Green Media) which operated in digital marketing and online […]
I read recently Shubheksha‘s blog post “A Beginner’s Very Bumpy Journey Through The World of Open Source” which describes her initial journeys into the open source world and reminded me a bit of some of my initial adventures into open source. (I even wrote a blog post ages ago — my goodness, literally ages ago […]
At the end of another tough week in Netflix I look back at what I have achieved and what has been challenging in achieving it. I do wonder what I do looks like from the outside and I can’t really see how someone would make sense of my job. I sit in front of 3 (sometimes more!) […]
If you use gradle and docker you must have come across the gradle-docker-plugin. And if you started using it a lot you probably found out that more often than not your builds start using the same boilerplate code to prepare your microservices containers. And if you end up in that situation best thing to avoid boilerplate rubbish […]
I use PMD in my Gradle builds quite a bit. (Maybe a bit more nowadays that the FindBugs peeps seem to be struggling with that project — see this email from Andrey on this: https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2016-November/004321.html). The issue I had with it is that there is no way to quickly turn off their checks for the src/test/… […]
As a developer, chances are every time you hear recursion mentioned you probably also hear of Fibonacci’s number. And in the same breath you probably hear also of stack overflow 🙂 Because — as you get to learn quickly — if you decide to implement Fibonacci’s number via a recursive function, you end up abusing […]
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