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ESPRESSO FRIDAYS

Every once in a while I send hand picked things I've learned. Kind of like your filter to the tech internet. No spam, I promise!

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Five Essential Focus Principles for Engineers

Focus is a huge problem in modern days. These days, lots of apps and websites try to grab our attention and keep us hooked. Most of us know we should resist these distractions. But instead of making a plan, many people just wing it. I used to do that too. But I’ve had enough. Another Instagram post, YouTube short, or funny meme won’t make me feel good about my day. In fact, they: Make my workday longer. Slow down my progress, bit by bit. So, I put together some tools and rules to help me stay...

5 days ago • 3 min read

Hi friends, On July 15th, 2019, I messed up bad. Real bad. I wanted to finish a project quickly, and show a quick POC to a customer I was working with. To make a long story short, I pushed a container, to a public repo, containing admin credentials to an AWS account. I thought of myself as a senior consultant, who delivers, fast, with no mistakes. Man I managed to break that reputation. The silver-lining however, is that I learned my lesson. So deeply so, that I’ve implemented these same...

11 days ago • 3 min read

Hi friends, Today we’re going to explore a lesser-known but incredibly powerful feature of Git: git rerere. This feature is particularly useful for anyone who frequently manages branches and encounters merge conflicts. * not a real magician What is git rerere? The git rerere feature stands for “reuse recorded resolution.” It helps to automate the resolution of merge conflicts by remembering how you’ve resolved them in the past. When enabled, git rerere kicks in as soon as a conflict occurs...

19 days ago • 2 min read

Hi Friends, Today, we’re diving into the often under-appreciated git blame. Often used to find out who last modified a line of code, git blame has several powerful features. Let’s explore some of these hidden gems, particularly focusing on the flags: -w -C -C -C -C -C -C blame -C -C -C ignores code movements across the entire history Ignoring Whitespace with the -w Flag Do you know the annoying blame results showing over an indent or a space removed / added? "-w" fixes that! git blame -w...

26 days ago • 1 min read

Hi friends, This is the story of how one mysterious hacker, took advantage of an inactive negligible library in Linux, and the maintainers emotional stress. Slowly, week after week, bit by bit lines of seemingly random testing code were added, in front of everyone’s eyes, to the Linux upstream. Thanks to one curious developer, who had an itch because of a tiny lag in his login process, sending him deep into the rabbit hole of Linux SSH and the mystic world of ZX, we would have never heard of...

about 1 month ago • 6 min read

Hi friends, You know how companies use merge commits when working on projects? Just go to one of your work projects and checkout the history of the main branch. It may look tidy (or not) but it’s bad for the environment (the real-world one 😉) Lots of merge commits While that’s pretty standard, it actually makes things messy. Every time we do this, it stops us from keeping our commit history nice and clean all the way through from development to production. Here’s why that’s a bit of a...

about 1 month ago • 2 min read

Hi friends, If you had asked me about the future of DevOps / infrastructure a few years ago, I would’ve pointed straight to serverless. I don’t think that anymore. After this week’s Kubecon in Paris (amazing event by the way!), here’s a collection of thoughts and prediction on the future of tech. The morning of the 3rd day at Kubecon Paris (21/03/24) While serverless was a big deal, the rise of container technology and Kubernetes has been astonishing, even the biggest advocates of the...

about 2 months ago • 1 min read

Hi friends, For eight years, I’ve been interviewing engineers for different positions. I compiled a list of questions I think every engineer, especially the experienced ones, should be able to answer pretty easily. Here is the list, with each question followed by what I expect: System Architecture This can be a generic “here’s our product, describe the architecture” type of question. But what I like to do, is use it as a followup to them describing the last place they worked at. If they can...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read

Hi friends, AWS is sometimes looked at as a money black hole where you’ll burn your cash the second you sign up. In a way, that’s not wrong. Interestingly, there's also a group of people who dive right in and only realize the expenses when they see their monthly bill. It doesn’t have to be this way AWS can be used at no cost, or if not entirely free, then for minimal expenses. Stating the obvious When you join, AWS enrolls you in their free tier, allowing you to use certain databases, compute...

2 months ago • 3 min read

Hi friends, Today, I want to share a powerful skill with you. If you choose to embrace it—and there are countless ways to do so—you’ll see growth in every aspect of your life. Yes, it’s that impactful. "Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up." - Stephen King Early in my career, my first mentor taught me about a valuable skill: writing. He convinced me that this one skill could benefit me, and everyone else, in...

2 months ago • 2 min read
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