Java has been my bread and butter for almost two decades. Several years ago, I started to learn Kotlin; I never regretted it. Though Kotlin compiles to JVM bytecode, I sometimes have to write Java again. Every time I do, I cannot stop pondering why my code doesn’t look as…

At the beginning of the year, I had two new Macs in a row in one month. I changed my company and had to return my previous laptop. …

Writing summaries of conference talks is the best way to focus on the talk and listen actively. Before conference speaking became part of my job, I did it. However, I don’t attend that many talks now, and I don’t take notes when I do. jPrime is a conference in Bulgaria…

In my previous blog post Chopping the monolith, I explained my stance on microservices and why it shouldn’t be your golden standard. However, I admitted that some parts of the codebase were less stable than others and had to change more frequently. I proposed “chopping” these few parts to cope…

Kotlin added the idea of Context Receivers in version 1.6.20. In this post, I’d like to toy with them to understand how useful they can be. Note that if you want to play along, you’ll need to compile with the -Xcontext-receivers flag. The main idea behind context receivers is to…

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m using Jekyll to generate the static site. I’m using GitLab: when I push on the master branch, it triggers the generation job. However, Jekyll is Ruby-based and requires a couple of Gem dependencies. I’ve also added a few plugins. For this reason…

Recently, I designed a simple metrics-tracking system. A Python script queries different providers’ APIs for metrics, e.g., Twitter, GitHub, etc. The idea is to run this script each day, store them in Google BigQuery and provide an excellent data visualization in Google Data Studio. …

If you attend conferences or read technical articles, you could think that microservices are the correct and only way to build a system at the moment. Despite some pushback from cooler heads, the default architecture is microservices. In this post, I’d like to argue why it’s wrong. I’ll first get…

Whether you like it or not, GitHub has become the primary provider to host one’s code. You or your company is probably using GitHub. I want to highlight some files to beautify your GitHub repository in this post. README I hope that by now, everybody is familiar with READMES. If one…