All - Leonid Mamchenkov

Four years at Qobo

Last week marked my fourth year at Qobo. Here are the blog posts that cover my first, second, and third years. And with one more now, I think it’s starting to fall into a trend of crazy years.

Yes, indeed. The last year has been no different. There were all the usual components:

A tonne of projects! We’ve done more in numbers, complexity, and variety of projects this year, than before.
The team is growing. And while not everybody stayed, we’ve found some new great people to join the team. Overall, we are more now than we were a year ago. And we’ve also expanded the roles. We have dedicated quality assurance and support people now.
New office. There is an office story every single year. First we moved the Nicosia office, then we opened a Limassol office, then we opened a London office. And this year we’ve moved the Limassol office to a larger space, as we couldn’t fit all the new people any more.
Technology. Over the last year we have almost doubled our infrastructure (thanks a lot Amazon AWS). We’ve played with Docker containers. We’ve moved from HipChat to Slack (somewhat a forced move, but it was interesting from the technology perspective, as we have a lot of integrations). And we have grown our Qobrix platform and some of the applications built on top of it significantly (over 160 versions released in a year).

I’ve learned so much, it almost seems that even the last year was a lifetime away. I’ve enjoyed working with everyone on the team, and even with most of the clients (evil grin). It’s unbelievable how much we have accomplished this year.

I also think that the next year will be even more interesting and challenging, as we’ll probably need to shift from the current mostly startup-like operation to a more of a settled and predictable one. Chaos can be very productive, but it’s less so with more people on board. So I’m excited to see what’s gonna happen this year.

Cheers and thanks to everyone who has been around this year!

open-policy-agent/opa – Open Source, general purpose policy agent

open-policy-agent/opa is an Open Source general purpose policy agent.

OPA gives you a high-level declarative language to author and enforce policies across your stack.

With OPA, you define rules that govern how your system should behave. These rules exist to answer questions like:

Can user X call operation Y on resource Z?

What clusters should workload W be deployed to?

What tags must be set on resource R before it’s created?

You integrate services with OPA so that these kinds of policy decisions do not have to be hardcoded in your service. Services integrate with OPA by executing queries when policy decisions are needed.

When you query OPA for a policy decision, OPA evaluates the rules and data (which you give it) to produce an answer. The policy decision is sent back as the result of the query.

The div that looks different in every browser

Martijn Cuppens tweets the link to this code snippet and a screenshot of how the code renders in different browsers. Yup. Each browser produces a different result. The Twitter thread has more examples.

This is yet another example of how CSS and cross-browser compatibility can drive a web developer insane.

laravolt/avatar – plug-n-play PHP library for quick dynamic avatars

laravolt/avatar is a PHP library that helps to avoid those old and boring anonymous face pictures for users who haven’t uploaded or configured their avatar in your application. With library you can use any string – name, email, initials, or anything else you fancy – to generate a dynamic avatar with random color and letters.

php-jsonq – a simple, elegant PHP package to query over any type of JSON data

php-jsonq provides an easy, yet powerful way to build queries for any JSON data (or PHP data structures for that matter, which are a step away). This has a variety of useful applications – data migration, API response filtering, complex configurations manipulation, and so on, and so forth.