Photo by Matt Hudson on Unsplash A few months ago, we had a hackathon at my work. At the opening event, one of my colleagues said to me: Hackathons are similar to building LEGO model without instructions. It stuck with me. I pondered about it. What crossed my mind is that hackathons are playgrounds for software engineers, where creativity is key. Imagine being handed a box of LEGO bricks, and the instructions are taken away; what would you build? Probably, whatever comes to your mind. That’s the magic of hackathons — they push you to think beyond boundaries, innovate, and ..read more

Photo by Santa Barbara on Unsplash Everyone makes mistakes. If someone says otherwise, they’re probably not being straight with you. It’s bound to happen whether you’re new to a job or have been there for a while. You can find plenty of horror stories on Reddit and HackerNews. Take, for example, this post with a collection of those stories: Ask HN: What's the worst you've ever screwed up at work? | Hacker News I felt that gut-wrenching moment when you realize a mistake has been made. The sinking feeling in your stomach, the twinge of shame, or the self-critical thoughts might flood&n ..read more

A humoristic post generated with the help of ChatGPT Do you wanna see me test? U wanna see me unit test? In the world of software development, unit testing is an essential process that ensures our code behaves precisely as we expect. But let’s be honest; unit testing is not the most glamorous part of coding. It’s the backstage crew, the hidden orchestrators behind a great performance. And just like the Eurovision Song Contest, our unit tests must be pitch-perfect to score the highest points in reliability and robustness. Now, imagine unit tests as a song in the Eurovision contest, sp ..read more

Photo by Bjarke Rosenbeck on UnsplashEssential tips and resources for a successful job hunt I was laid off from my previous job. It came out of nowhere; I decided to take this change as an opportunity and make the best of it. Luckily, I received incredible support from my connections, and I want to give back by sharing some valuable lessons and resources I’ve gathered along my job search journey. This blog post is based on a Twitter (Hebrew) thread I created, detailing my experience and offering practical advice to fellow software engineers (and not only) facing a similar situat ..read more

Photo by shawnanggg on UnsplashOr let’s talk about cohesion TL;DR To make a system cohesive, you must ensure that the parts that go together are close to one another. I sometimes find that the cohesion (and coupling) concept is often considered way too academic, and developers tend to talk about other well-known concepts, such as DRY, YAGNI, KISS, and SRP. The list is long, and I can continue with more acronyms all day ? So, I’ve chosen to challenge myself and simplify it. I hope I succeeded. Have you decided to continue reading? Let’s talk about why it’s crucial or, in Ken ..read more

srcMY HUMBLE EFFORT TO SIMPLIFY DOCKER PART II Solving the “It works on my machine” syndrome I covered the basics of creating and building Docker images in part I (if you haven’t read that yet, I would recommend it since this part is based on it). In this part, I’ll explain how to run and delete an image of the container you’ve built. let’s continue — src Running an image is as simple as docker run -it image_name:tag . Let’s break it down; tag is the one you set when building it; note that if you remove it, then docker assumes you point to the latest. The meaning of -it isi ..read more

Photo by Louis Hansel on UnsplashA brief introduction to YAML What is YAML? And how it works? Recently I switched jobs, and as part of this change, I’ve been introduced to a whole new tech stack. RabbitMQ ?, Java Spring, Docker, etc. (meaning more subjects to write about ?). Most of the technologies I use on a daily basis consume YAML as their configuration. In this post, I’ll try to illustrate what I’ve learned (and from where) while trying to understand this new world. Learn the YAML way — src.It is what it is ? YAML stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language, originally ..read more

to write or not to write, this is the question — src In every team I was part of, a debate started on this point: should the developers write automation tests as part of the development process? They’ve just finished implementing the requirements and wrote some unit tests; now, should they also write automated tests? Well, the answer, “it depends”. Depending on the people’s skillset, teams’ structure. When you have manual/exploratory testers with no skills/time/resources/etc. to write automated tests, you can rely on developers. Thus it is much more productive if developers write the tests for ..read more

Photo by Joshua Aragon on UnsplashMy humble effort on managing your career Few months ago, I switched jobs. As part of this move, I have changed my daily programming language from C#, which I have been using for over eight years, to Java. It might confuse some people and raise a few eyebrows here and there asking why I would drop my experience just to start with a new language. In what follows, I will explain the rationale for doing so and the process involved. Are you insane? Why did you do that? whyyyyy — src What made me abandon a language (re-hyped in recent years) that I'm ..read more