Don’t commit your terraform state to github please, especially if it contains over 20 API keys for various services, and database master passwords.

Not speaking from experience of having to do some frantic rebasing of someones PR *eye twitch*

!rant
working from office for the first time since Covid started.
so many little things I didnt even realise I missed, like an ethernet cable straight into the corp network so I dont have to connect to a VPN just to run a Jenkins build.

Just use the variable on the line after the promise, it will be populated then…

From a “tech lead”

mvn clean install: all tests pass

run all tests in IntelliJ: the same 6 tests fail every time

run those 6 tests in IntelliJ: they pass

-_-

Shameless blog plug, but it does count as a rant 😅

Seriously folks, stop calling everything a service.

https://likelikeatemyshield.com/pos...

On a past project, every sprint planning was the most unproductive meeting. We were expected to fix all open bugs each sprint, so there was literally nothing to plan. How do you prioritize when the goal is “do everything”? 😂

I guess you could say that my speciality is cloud at scale. I’d say it chose me more than I chose it.
Looking back on it though, I think what I like about my speciality is the unique challenges it brings.
Every speciality has its own set of challenges, like tight resource limits in embedded, or client-server synchronisation in native/mobile.

The challenge of cloud at scale is throughput. Designing systems that can support 100K users making a bazillion requests a second, or a data pipeline firing events that you need to process in near real time without dropping a single one.
The real challenge of course is doing all this within a sensible budget. We have virtually infinite compute but we dont have infinite dollars to spend on it.

Its a fun problem to solve.

Amazon what the hell.
You provide a cool RDS proxy which can be used to manage connection pooling which is especially useful for concurrent Lambda invocations.
But if you have an Aurora cluster and a read-intensive workload it is basically useless because it only sends traffic to the writer instance.
WTF?! Literally the one use case we have is the one thing it doesn’t do. AAARRRGGHHHH

sister in law: *gets new laptop*
*produces antivirus*
“I’m not putting that on, I don’t need it”

me: *visible confusion*

Wondering about how I should continue with my blog.
One the one hand, Ive always liked the video format Uncle Bob uses, and I think Id actually find it easier to talk about my ideas rather than write about it.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people prefer a written article they can read at their own pace.
Thinking I might try a hybrid of some sort, like record a vlog and then write the article afterwards, using the video for reference since I already got the words out.

If only kids exam results were as impressive as their Snapchat streaks...

Worked on a team where every single sprint planning was a useless meeting because we were expected to deliver everything in the backlog every sprint. So what are we really planning?

Don’t put pressure on yourself to understand everything. No single person understands it all, that’s why there’s a bunch of us.

Kong API Gateway in Kubernetes is a load of balls. Spent half a day trying to stabilise the deployment after I bumped its pod resource requests.

Just a quick rant to express my distaste that the AWS ALB ingress controller for Kubernetes doesnt expose any useful metrics. I just wanna know the target response latency is that too much to ask?

I ran a big long-running terraform apply and somehow thought it would still work if I locked my laptop.
When I went back the next day (I know lol) terraform was hanging, had to force stop which screwed up the remote tfstate.
Had to spend a whole day manually deleting about 70 AWS resources that terraform created but had no knowledge of because of the corrupted state.

This is just.... wow

Blog: Never ever try to turn a rushed demo build into a live product.

https://likelikeatemyshield.com/pos...

Decided to start a software engineering blog after several years of procrastinating.
likelikeatemyshield.com
Just published my first post. Feedback is welcome :)

Sometimes Mockito feels like the final boss of testing rather than a tool to help me

How to get ANYONE to leave you alone, make swan-like hissing noises at them

Me: *Writes a nice little AWS Lambda service using Java 12*

Reviewing Dev: Lambda only supports JDK 8

Me: *Dies inside and cries as I replace every occurence of var*

Dear Amazon,
DocDB only allows one automatic backup per day.

Why?

That is all.

It’s 2019, why is Maven still a thing?

Uncle Bob, Martin Fowler, Kevlin Henney, Doc Norton, Allen Holub.

They have all taught me great things about software development, whether through books or superb conference talks.

My last post was over a month ago about updating my CV to escape this place.
Pleased to report I got the job 😎

Today, during an update from senior management, I was casually sitting in the corner filling in my CV to get out of here lol.

Metroid meets Calvin & Hobbes.
Do I really need to explain why?

Well yesterday I had the absolute joy of marrying @GIS-Jedi.
I think I have gotten more Facebook notifications today than I did in all of 2018

If you are a mobile game developer and you make those stupid interactive ads that pop up in the middle of another game and try to make me play it. I dont like you and would sooner leave a bad review on your game for having the audacity to invade my other games. Stop it. It is the most annoying type of ad I have ever seen and actively discourages me from downloading your game. Mobile games are already basically a cancer without that horrendous experience.