February 7, 2020

Delegation

One thing about job hopping is that you get to experience new perspectives on how people work. It forces you to reconsider what’s obvious. Take delegation for example. I used to think anyone with a bit of experience can do it effectively. It’s just about decomposing a system and assigning components to different people, right? It turns out effective delegation is much more nuanced. Situational Leadership Situation Leadership is a model that ascribes different delegation styles based on the competency (skill) and commitment (motivation) of each team member.

February 3, 2020

Why Algo Interviews

Algorithm interviews are the norm in software engineering. They provide a good enough approximation on whether an engineer makes good architecture and design decisions. As example, let’s do a quick study of whether to use DynamoDB or RDBMS to store data for a project. DynamoDB Fact(s) Implemented as a distributed hashtable. Distributed by design Pros Very little operational overhead. There’s no need to create multiple DB users; No need to study query plans; No need to think about how much disk space, RAM, or CPUs to assign to your DB; Only one option for table design (flat tables).

January 4, 2020

Viper Examples

Viper is a configuration library fo Go. It has been my go to library for configs. Some of the best features of Viper are: Ability to unmarshal subsets of a configuration file into a Go struct Ability to override contents of a configuration file using OS environment variables Here’s a brief example that demonstrates both features: Assume you have a configuration file at $HOME/server.toml resolve_dns = true http_keep_alive = 5 [example_com] doc_root = "/var/www/example_com" allow_files = "*.

January 4, 2020

Storing Configuration in the environment

There are two different ways to store configurations in the environment. One can choose to store a file name in an environment variable, or one can choose to use one environment variable per configuration. Take https://github.com/spf13/viper for example, the BindEnv() and related functions are designed to work with the one env var per configuration approach. The downside is that setting environment variables in the OS is tedious and requires flat/unstructured configurations.

November 29, 2019

Go1 13 Errors

For me, Go 1.13 arrived with anticipation of better error handling. Presently, the second Google search result for Go 1.13 error hanlding is an article that refers to the “xerrors” package. One feature of the xerrors package is that it produced errors with a stack trace showing where the error came from. The addition to Go 1.13, however, did not include this particular feature, and left me spending frustrating hours trying to debug the loss of stack trace after switching from xerrors to the standard library.

September 3, 2019

Why We Code Review

Code review can be an important part of a team’s culture, so it is worth thinking about. If you asked me about code review two years ago, I would’ve said its key to maintaining code quality and mentoring less experienced programmers. Now I know better. Code review is much about making the code better as it is about making the team happier. How the team runs code reviews should be based on the team’s values and culture.

August 30, 2019

Configuring iTerm For a Better Keyboard Experience

The default terminal on OS X isn’t really that great. It doesn’t let me reconfigure keybindings to my liking. There are two other terminal choices for OS X: Hyper and iTerm 2. When it comes to being customizable, I think Hyper wins. However, there are some really annoying things about it: It is an Electron app, which means it is a memory hog. You cannot drag and manipulate tabs the way you can with native apps.

August 22, 2019

Interview Questions

Good technical interview questions are hard to find. In the last month, I’ve seen some really great ones and equally bad ones. I want to go through some of them and write down my highly biased 5-star rating on their effectiveness. First, for some context on how I evaluate interview questions. Your interview questions should be: Respectful of the candidates Objective and evaluated consistently Gathers relevant and insightful data

August 19, 2019

Deploying Go

I’ve written a lot of Python. If I need to create something quickly, I tend to go to Python. I’ve written a lot of Java. But I almost never write Java code outside of work. One thing I liked about Java over Python, however, was ease of deployment. I can package all third party dependencies into a single executable jar, making it easy to upload and distribute artifacts. I have never mastered packaging Python for distribution.

August 19, 2019

Own Your Data

I previously wrote about owning my own data. An important part of data ownership is backing up your data. I use S3 as my long term data store. It is pretty easy to set this up using Terraform.

S3

Provisioning a S3 bucket is simply a single Terraform resource:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "repo_archive_log" {
  acl = "log-delivery-write"
  bucket = "example-bucket"
  tags = {
    Name = "example"
    TTL = "persistent"
    ManagedBy = "Terraform"
  }
}