I highly recommend this book for beginning writers and students (high school and above). The first two short parts of the book focus on aspects and techniques to improve writing. …

When I hear, “One of the key aspects of leadership is to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.”, I ask, “what does it mean to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity?” Sadly, there have been no good crisp, actionable answers :( So, here’s my take on leadership, uncertainty, and ambiguity. …

Be very careful when using concurrency with abstractions — Issue Recently, a colleague repeatedly executed an Android emulator-based test to check if the test was flaky. Out of these 100 executions, one execution had failed due to ConcurrentModificationException in the AndroidX Test library. Since we were looking for flakiness reasons in the test and environment, it was strange to see…

In software, we come across three common types of tests: unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end (e2e) tests. A top-down approach While designing software, we start with an abstract description of the use case and decompose it into basic steps in terms of the feature of the underlying system. Since the feasibility and…

Aka Simplifying Contract Testing — Context Consider a client (e.g., a messaging mobile app) that interacts with a service (e.g., the corresponding messaging service). We have three options to test this client. Test the client against a published instance of the service. If the test expects specific responses from the service (e.g., user X has 10…

Recently, I upgraded to R 4.0.1. To avoid broken packages, I started updating installed packages using installed.packages() and install.packages(). This solution was less than ideal because, if a dependee package was not built for R 4.0.1, then the dependent package failed to build and install. After some search, I stumbled…

These books cover design trade-offs to consider when scaling systems, the cost and benefits of each design choice, and how current technologies embrace and influence these design choices. They do so while being focused on practice. Books 1 and 2 are more high-level and cover aspects relevant when designing and…

Recently, while writing an article about logging in Python, I started identifying artifacts and actions that we commonly use when we talk about logging. Here’s what I came up with. When we use a logging library, we perform/trigger the following common tasks while using the associated concepts (highlighted in bold). …

Thoughts on why+how container technology influenced software development — Why? Containers serve as commonly agreed upon deployment units between Dev teams and Ops teams, and this eliminates the possibility of missing artifacts when a Dev team hands over a program to the Ops team for deployment. Containers allow Dev teams to package any software required by the deployed program, and…