When bytes
meet Mike

The end of the year is an especially intensive recruitment season for many IT companies & software houses. This does not mean that only HR departments have their hands (and calendars) full. As one of the last steps before offering (or not) a job, a technical interview has to take place. Selected engineers, previously busy with technical stuff, have to now become recruiters, verifying people’s skills and experience. And that’s quite of a challenge!

In this post, I’d like to describe the issue I’ve recently encountered when using Helm umbrella charts. Long story short, it turned out that subcharts are not completely isolated from each other, contrary to what we probably would expect. This feature has also some important consequences for building umbrella charts and combining different dependencies into one parent chart, which I want to outline as well. Umbrella charts basics Helm umbrella charts are an easy and powerful way of installing multiple components as a single one.

People are using all their senses for recognition. Just think about how many jingles, slogans, images, or even actor faces unequivocally remind us of something. They are consistently building what we call a brand. It’s not a coincidence by the way - it’s called multisensory marketing. Software engineering loves consistency too - not only when ACID comes to play, but also in terms of technical content. Interestingly, only some of the tech companies I know managed to build a consistent, nice to look at visual identification or technical brand (surprisingly, the budget often seems not to be a reason for that).

At the end of 2018, I had a pleasure to give a talk at Testwarez - the oldest testing-oriented conference organized in Poland. The recording recently appeared on YouTube, so I decided to take this opportunity to figure out what has changed through the past few months in terms of tools that I presented. The goal of my talk was to present some practices and open source tools for improving the overall security of Java-based projects.

A typical luggage case padlock with 3 rings and TSA (backdoor) lock on the left A combination of 3 digits - this is the level of protection offered by the vast majority of luggage cases on the market. 3 digits secret code, that should keep all your personal belongings safe at the aircraft, lobby and hotel room. Lots to expect for just 3 digits… Let’s say you already selected your secret code and you’re just going on your holiday.

I have to admit, that when I first saw Project Lombok few years ago it was quite odd to me. The whole “annotation thing” and code pieces appearing “magically” inside the classes made me skeptical. A few years later, I’m now a fan of using Lombok in my Java projects for many reasons. Not all of its users know, that Lombok has more than just reducing the boilerplate code to offer.

Building docker images within the CI pipeline isn’t something new or unusual these days. Normally it’s super easy - you just have to install Docker in your Jenkins CI environment and add jenkins user to the docker group. Problems appear when your Jenkins instance is a docker container itself. Inception begins How to make docker available inside your container? Here is a three steps solution: Install docker in your container. Expose docker socket (/var/run/docker.

I want to share with you some of my thoughts about using Apache Solr (especially SolrCloud) on production. In one of the projects I’m participating in, we are using it to provide Near-Real-Time (NRT) searching along with frequent updates to the indexes. Here are some tips, that helped our project stand still on production environment against hundreds of simultaneous requests per second. This post is focused on the memory related aspects of the Solr configuration.

The cryptographic world changed a lot since 2008 when Google’s Keyczar library showed up. However, one thing is still the same - effective cryptography is really hard to implement. Keyczar library was a quite successful attempt to provide easy to use crypto solutions based on current security standards to Java, Python and C++. Now, after 9 years of its development, the future doesn’t look so bright. Ain’t no sunshine when it’s old In the late 2016 Keyczar’s maintainers announced that:

Luke, I am Your Father! In his first day at the new job, Bob created the following class: import java.util.Arrays; import java.util.List; /** * Returns a sum of given numbers. * @author Bob */ public class NumberSumCalculator { public int sum(List<Integer> integers) { int sum = 0; if (integers != null) { for (Integer integer : integers) { sum += integer; } } return sum; } } He was so proud of it, so he put the @author Javadoc tag with his name at the top.