• How to facilitate the review & approval of your changes

  Contributing to new repositories that your team does not own can feel daunting, and raising your first merge request can feel like a genuine hurdle to be passed.

• Now, Next, Later - how to simplify planning

  Planning work is usually a very heated topic with no universally correct answer. I’ll try to expand on the concept of Now, Next, Later planning that I have been using for the last few months and why I think they make planning for any engineering team much more manageable.

• Three types of metrics to consider when developing your next feature

  It can be very tempting to instrument all the things and have a lot of data, but that comes with a burden, both financial and also in terms of time spent developing. What would be the prime candidates for observing and generating metrics on?

• Drawbacks of using Kafka as a task processing queue

  Kafka is great for a lot of things, but using it as a task-processing queue is not where it shines, and I’ll tell you a few reasons why.

• Why problem statements matter

  Writing a problem statement before jumping into coding is an undervalued approach, and I will tell you why.

• When pointers bite back in Go

  Overriding pointers inside of local function works as it should… but not the way you might expect!

• Launching Plex/Radarr/Sonarr on your own VM

  Launching a full stack Plex setup including nginx reverse proxy, as well as automatic cert generation by LetsEncrypt.

• Kafka streaming in Python using Faust

  Understanding the use-cases and how Faust works, as well as some of the more nifty features.

• Singletons and instance varibles in Ruby

  Understanding how class << self works and its interaction with the @instance_var and the big trouble it can cause.

• Unexpected Integer behaviour in RLang

  Understanding why “100000” and 100000 are not equal… and a deep dive into the factor logic of RLang.