Posts

Instead of pet projects — which for most of us end up frozen in the state shown in the picture¹ — I make a point of building showcase projects. The approach has worked out well and (I think) caught on with my team.

Even among strong engineers you can often hear the following take:

Well, microservices — that’s where everyone tinkers however they like, picks whatever they want, and somehow solves problems on their own.

Unfortunately, this is a common misconception. Let’s talk about the benefits of applying the Service Template¹ pattern at the company level.

Engineering maturity is a marker of strong preparation, depth of experience, and breadth of perspective.

My current and former coworkers know that I use three terms to characterize the level of engineering maturity:

• Consistency
• Systematicity
• Reproducibility

Let’s go through what I mean by each. I’ll bring examples from my own domain and would be glad to hear yours in the comments.

This post is a response to a comment from one of my subscribers, who suggested the topic for the next post:

… how to set up Docker so the LB routes straight into the right containers

How do I see the task?

When developing locally, many people skip simulating https and run their services over http.

Here’s the task:

• Serve traffic locally over https with a valid certificate;
• Make it easy to reproduce — not just for you, but for everyone on your team.

Many of us, back in the day, did web development, and to develop and test the next project locally we’d add another entry to /etc/hosts along the lines of:

127.0.0.1       next-project.tld

“1024 lashes for anyone using http.DefaultClient in their code” — that’s the kind of “joke” you hear at our standups. The problem is that the defaults don’t set any timeouts. There’s a great article on the topic on the Cloudflare blog¹.

I use Uber’s fx¹ IoC container in my work. There are camps on both sides — fans and detractors of this kind of solution — but here we’ll focus specifically on using fx.

If you’re not familiar with the basics, I recommend going through the official Quick Start². It’ll help you get your bearings.

Given:

• gitlab, most likely deployed inside an internal network;
• “perfectionism” that demands everything be filed neatly into folders, or a directive from above;
• an internal Go package that needs to be installed as a dependency.

Given:

• You’re using Jetbrains Space¹.
• You write code in Go.
• You need to create a shared library and pull it in as a module across your internal projects.