Calendar says it. It’s been a week. I still can’t believe it, but yep, calendar claims so. It’s been 7 days since my newborn son and wife were released from the hospital. I’m sure some would expect that I’d describe these seven days as complete and utter horror. No sleep. No time. No food. Dirty […]
Using different GitHub users on same machine
Here’s a scenario – for 99% of time, I’m using my work account for GitHub. That means that out of 90 GitHub repositories that I have cloned, 88 of them are work related (numbers are made up!). What that further means is that, I almost never need to push stuff to my personal repositories. Well, […]
What should I do if I can’t (or don’t want to) afford therapy?
It’s a fact. Some people can’t afford it, whereas some explicitly don’t want to do it. No matter what your reasoning is, one thing is certain – price of ignoring your mental health is horrendous (and yes, I’m writing a separate article on that). I will try outlining everything that I’ve learned through my 7+ […]
Crash, Recovery and Binary Logs
We had a funny situation. Our Sphinx Search Engine crashed the other day and, once restarted, it reported that it’s doing crash-recovery of Real-Time (RT) Index using a 76GB binary log. And you don’t need to be Computer Science major to understand that recovering anything from 76 gigs would take … a while. Now, here’s […]
What I didn’t know about ‘I’ in ACID
From having your ORM randomly lose data to getting $50,000 in BTC stolen, is a range of documented issues related to faulty understanding of DB isolation levels and how they behave under concurrency. And that’s stupid, because, if you took 10mins to read this article, you’d be well equipped to actually understand how your system […]
Ability to Deliver: Rather important and yet often ignored Engineering skill
Ability to deliver working software within an agreed timeframe is one of the defining characteristics of a Senior Engineer. Understanding WHAT you are building, WHY is it being built and WHEN it needs to be delivered is obligatory. And, just like any other skill, it requires knowledge and constant practice. This article will provide you […]
Integrate-first approach
This is a mistake I keep seeing, and occasionally becoming a victim of, which just shows how easy it is to be fooled by it. Whenever it comes to building anything involving more than one component, I’d always have a tendency to try and build in isolation-first, and work on integration later. I’d even fool […]
Project Hail Mary and Debugging Legacy Apps
What do the new book by Andy Weir and debugging of legacy apps have in common? If we ignore the fact that Andy is a former software engineer who successfully became a successful writer (somebody’s wet dream came true), and hence my admiration, there’s something else in play here. To be clear, I absolutely […]
How I Learned to Learn (or how to learn effectively as an adult)
Would you be surprised to learn that acquiring new knowledge becomes much harder once you go past your mid-20s? Specifically, the number seems to reside around 25th mark. Nobody has a definite WHY, but there seem to be multiple factors at play. One, which is rather obvious, is […]
Turning Chaos into a Line
I’m the most chaotic and unorganized person ever. Seriously. Give me an unknown task and, deep down, I go full blown hazard. Favorite example is my manager making a request to provide a timeline and plan to do X, where X is usually something that I have no faintest idea about. Gotta admit that […]