It’s the Journey, Not the Destination

Once an organization transitions from a start-up to a more mature business, it often finds that its software development velocity stalls when it tries to add new features or attempts to refactor problematic code. This is because without solid, automated tests developers don’t know if they’ve broken existing behavior. Management then tries to ameliorate the …

Recursion

What’s Recursion? A recursive function solves a problem by solving smaller instances of the larger problem. It does this by calling itself with different parameters until a base case is reached, and the function simply returns vis-à-vis a non-recursive expression. Recursion is most commonly used to traverse data structures with indeterminate depth, such as multi-dimensional …

Kubernetes Secret Management

Most apps consume secret data (e.g. API keys, database passwords etc.). We explored managing configuration in the first part of this series using configmaps. However, configmaps are meant for storing non-sensitive configuration data because they are unencrypted at rest and usually are set by a yaml file, which would likely be checked into source control.

Evaluating an Existing Tech Project

A dilemma often faced by professional programmers is whether to work with what they have, or start fresh when inheriting others’ code. They say it’s easier to write code than to read it (especially other people’s code). Why is this? Unless the code is perfectly readable, it’s challenging to put yourself in someone else’s head. …

The Essence of Functional Programming

This post is aimed toward giving a basic understanding of functional programming (fp) for the beginning to intermediate JavaScript developer with a few years of experience. This is not an endorsement of applying such techniques in arbitrary circumstances. Other factors, such as existing code, co-workers’ experiences and preferences etc. are important factors when deciding to …