Latest blog posts about Work

A few months ago, I became the Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Visma e-conomic. This new position is allowing me to work with brilliant people! In our industry, brilliant colleagues often have a hard time collaborating, and communication is very hard. In this post, I want to talk about the start of our journey from an Operational (Ops) team to embracing SRE using kindness and compassion as a way: Trust and forgiveness.

The journey that I have decided to take with Siderus brought myself always in embarrassing moment on meetings Hyped discussion about “Blockchain” and data storage. In this article I don’t want to talk about the misconceptions about storing data into a blockchain, but instead I want to focus on a more generic question that I have been asked: Is a blockchain useful for human being? Can we use it for good?

During the last year I have learned how important it is to build, test and deploy using always the same docker container as well as reducing its size. As I have not found anything online, I want to remember and share it: I am testing my go packages with a multistage docker build inside my pipeline on GitLab. The odd way of testing go docker containers Especially when implementing CI best practices, I have seen projects running tests in different ways:

One of the biggest things that I have been learning is the discipline of being focused on the main goal. I get distracted every few minutes, and if it is not an advertisement, or a funny cloud in the sky, it is an event that we may consider bigger than it actually is. Instead, I don’t want to lose the focus on the prize. I want to write something personal. I remember when I was in high school.

I remember when I was 10 and my mother was worried about me staying too much in front of the computer, writing lines of weird text on a black and white screen; I used to be one of these boys that were not supported by friends and family, because it was hard to understand computers… 🤔 but now things have changed, and writing code is cool. I consider myself a 75% self-taught developer, meaning that I have been learning how to write code by myself, a little in school and by working.

JavaScript development is crazy, and evolving fast… and the more you learn about it the more you realize how crazy it has become 😅. I think it is exciting, indeed, but Sean, in his clear post explained perfectly why a simple project is over-engineered and I have to disagree with him: some JavaScript’s frameworks, like React, are not the cause of unnecessarily complicated projects… and React is not over engineered!

Few days ago, while watching The Martian something special happened to me: I got my first epileptic seizure. I don’t remember that much of that evening, but I realized how much I grew up by moving away from Italy, and deciding to stop working for Startups.

During the last month I started experimenting a lot with some editors for software development. I’ve been playing for 2 weeks with Atom and Visual Studio Code and here are my impressions from a Mac and Sublime user.

I really care about keeping the OS clean and untouched. Sometimes, when I have to develop using specific softwares and tools, I have to modify core and important sections of the system on my Mac or PC, and this can create some problems with package managers (like homebrew for Mac OS X; or like APT, pacman or yum for GNU/Linux)… For example, few months ago I installed node.js on my Mac using the official package.

Since I started working at bigger startups, like MinbilDinbil, I had to face the problem of providing pages to a larger amount of users every day. For this reason, it is really important to use a CDN service like CloudFlare, in order to provide a good user experience on our website: we don’t want our clients wait too much to load the homepage! How do we do that? The author of GNU grep once said: