Blogs

It was on the height of the Greek Crisis back in 2012 when I decided to stop reading the news. The amount of depression I was getting from them was unbelievable. Back then every media outlet was representing my country as lazy people, that we don’t try enough to solve the problem etc. It also painted a picture in which we were to leave the EU and crash out to oblivion....

Lets start by defining what is plot. Plot is the series of related events that make up a story or drama. Each event hooks out curiosity and pulls us forward to the next event. Here’s my thesis on product development: for a product to be successful it has to have a strong plot, it has to have coherency, it has to tell a story. Below I’ll give examples from traditional story telling theory and how that applies to product development....

Definition: In human–computer interaction, the signal–to–noise ratio represents the ratio of relevant to irrelevant information in an interface or communication channel. Recently I’ve read a post about signal to noise ratio for interface design. It’s a very interesting post, that I recommend but it got me thinking about the same concept when communicating between humans. The post had two main points that I’d like to have a closer look...

It’s Friday. You finished work. You went home, made lunch, talked with your loved ones and it’s time for some you time. You open Netflix, determined to find a good movie and chill! Great. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll…. 15 minutes later… Nah, I don’t want to watch anything now, the moment is gone. Or even worst, you watch one episode here, one episode there and nothing ever completes. Does that sound familiar?...

Interacting with people ain’t easy. Lets imagine a scenario where a lot of people come together and they are talking about something. Lets call this scenario a meeting. I have a problem in those scenarios. Silences make me uncomfortable. Really really uncomfortable. Especially earlier in my life I would end up trying to fill every nook and cranny of silence. This creates a big problem. In fact, it’s so big that can hinder your personal and professional development....

Recently I started a new job. This brings an entire host of new habits to build and things to get adjusted to. One of these things is the fact that my commute shrunk by a lot, sco now I have no time to read in the train. This is a good problem to have, but still one to find a solution to. The way my commute works right now is 15 minutes in the train, 15 minutes walk to work (roughly)....

Lately I’ve been thinking that I wanted to redesign my blog. I wasn’t happy with the previous result, aesthetically. The simple solution to this would have been to just change the CSS. The blog engine (Jekyll) was just fine. It was doing everything I wanted. But I didn’t do that. Why? Mostly because I am a frontend developer that works a lot with React. It’s within my comfort zone to work with it and I wanted to practice....

After reading Building Microservices I felt really inspired and then i wanted to learn more about microservices and devops. Specifically about useful patterns that appy in building modern software I’ve learned so many things. Useful patterns like the circuit breaker or the blocked threads antipattern. More than that it helped me build a deeper understanding on troubleshooting errors in production. This is an amazing book that I really recommend as a follow up read after Building Microservices....

These days having a VPN is a very smart choice you can do. Either you work on a public space, in your office or any foreign country you are travelling. You can never be sure who is listening. Also there are certain governments that are not really friendly. So once you decided a VPN is worth it you need to understand how it really works. In very abstract terms what you are doing is setting up a connection between your device (laptop, smartphone etc) to a remote server (the VPN provider)....

I’ve been working around Microservices for years, but only recently I did start wondering about how everything ties together. My experience at TransferWise helped me to start looking deeper in this world. More specifically, as we move from a monolith to micro services and huge scaling I wanted to know how all the different tools and processes came to be. This book is exactly what I was looking for to get answers about all that....