Tag: software engineering

Reading postmortems

Once in a while a seemingly straightforward article turns into a goldmine of links and resources. This happened to me today with this one – “Reading postmortems“.

Not only this article itself is a very nice roundup of common sources for system failures, but it also links to a couple of awesome references:

  • Simple Testing Can Prevent Most Critical Failures: An Analysis of Production Failures in Distributed Data-Intensive Systems. This is both a talk and a paper.
  • danluu/post-mortems – a GitHub repository with a collection of publicly available postmortems from a variety of organizations, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, NASA, GitHub, and more.

If you still have no idea what postmortem is, Wikipedia explains.

Monorepos: Please don’t!

I have only recently discovered the concept of monorepos. It does sound interesting and I am yet to try it out, or, at least, dig deeper into the subject. But then, there are people who have strong opinions against them, and I the reasoning makes all the sense to me. Here’s a nice one: Monorepos: Please don’t!

sr.ht (“sir hat”) – open source software suite for managing your software development projects


sr.ht – pronounced “sir hat” – is a new competitor in the world of GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab.  Much like all of these, you can either self-hosted it or use a managed service.  It might not yet be as fancy, polished, and cool (I think they need a better name and the domain) as its competitors, but there are a couple of reasons that might make a difference when making a choice:

  1. Open Source.  From a quick look, sr.ht is distributed under the GNU Afero GPL.
  2. Modular.  The suite consists of the following components:
    1. git – git repository hosting service
    2. build – continuous integration service
    3. lists – mailing lists service
    4. todo – ticketing system / bug tracker
    5. dispatch – task dispatcher and integration service
    6. man – markdown and git-based wiki service
    7. meta – account management service

 




Microservices Architecture : Best Practices


The other day I came across this article: “Microservices Architecture: All the Best Practices You Need to Know“.  There’s been a lot said and written about the microservices architectures around the web.  But I like this article in particular, because it paints a more realistic picture, in my opinion.  Big parts of it are covering the “why?” part of the whole conversation, and it presents a balanced view of pros and cons, as well as several approaches to solving the problems.

This is very refreshing after tonnes of “Microservices are amazing, and are the best thing since sliced bread” and “Microservices is nothing but hype and bubble” coverage out there.




Periodic Table of Software Engineering


I came across this Periodic Table of Software Engineering, and I think it’s an excellent visualization.  For those working their way to become software engineers, it provides a nice map of skills, topics, and knowledge areas to cover.  For the rest, it clearly explains why software is so much more complex than anybody thinks.