2023
3 Mistakes That Give Microservices a Bad Name
I’m sad to see that microservices are falling in popularity among architects and developers. Some say they are unnecessarily complex or overengineered. That one needs to learn so many new tools and technologies. That they introduce problems we had already solved. However, many ‘do microservices’ (unintentionally) wrong…
Why Developers Should Stop Using ISO 8601 for Date-Time
When documenting APIs, developers often link to ISO 8601 as the standard for computer-readable date and date-time format. Dates and times (and time zones!) are complicated. There are so many edge cases and pitfalls. I’m sure every developer has a battle story about them. It’s good to delegate that hard work to somebody else. So when an international body that everybody knows and trusts publishes such a standard, it’s no surprise all the API designers start referring to it.
2021
Replace null with ES6 Symbols
When I was working on my small side-project library, I needed to represent a missing value. In the past, I’d used the nullable approach in simple settings and Option (aka Maybe) when I wanted more control. In this case neither felt correct so I came up with a different approach I’d like to present.
Dictator paradox: Why micromanagement is so tempting
I firmly believe all creative people hate when others tell them what to do. When instead of problems to solve they are handled solutions to implement or, even worse, isolated tasks to just complete. Yet, the world is full of micromanagers. Over my career, I’ve heard countless complaints about how managers do not give their reports enough context, enough trust, enough freedom. That they decide all on their own. Why is that?
TypeScript Enums I Want to Actually Use
Since the very first moment I learned about TypeScript, I knew there’s always goona be this one thing I’ll hate on: Enums. So un-elegant, so old-school, and so why-do-you-polute-my-runtime. Well, I was wrong. I use Enums now. At least some of them. Let me show you.
Engineering Managers Should Not Have the Best Tech Skills in Team
Recently I was re-reading one of my favorite engineering articles The Trident Model of Career Development. The sentence that caught my eye this time was a note about the role of a Tech Lead: ‘They should have good but not necessarily the best tech skills in the team they are leading.’ How does this apply to an Engineering Manager?
Are open-source databases dead? [Quora answer]
Yes, they are dying (this is no joke answer). Sure, many open-source databases are being used and maintained every day. And, of course, any open-source software will exist and can be forked by anybody. So on the technical level, they cannot die.
2019
Embedding a YouTube Channel (not only) in AMP
This is a simple tutorial for embedding a YouTube channel into an AMP. With a small modification, this can be used for any website.
Function length property is not to be trusted
This article is a reply to Stefan Judis’s article How the rest operator and default values affect the function length property.
2017
Async testing Koa with Jest
Let’s briefly describe the libraries we will be working with. Koa is a JavaScript web server framework. It was developed by the people behind a more famous Express as a lightweight and expressive ‘spiritual successor.’
Do pure functions exist in JavaScript?
Recently I got into a discussion about how to decide a function is pure in JavaScript. The whole concept of pureness seems to be blurry in such a dynamic language.
First result in a sequence of promises
Recently we were implementing a feature in our app that resulted in a nice kata-like task, encouraging me to play with JavaScript Promises and deepening my knowledge of them.
2015
Index as a key is an anti-pattern
It looks elegant and it does get rid of the warning (which was the ‘real’ issue, right?). What is the danger here? Let me explain, a key is the only thing React uses to identify DOM elements. What…