In the previous article, I focused on technical debt as a crucial concept not merely in the engineering domain but in multiple business areas and how effective communication and speaking the language of other stakeholders is critical for successfully dealing with it. This time, let’s dedicate more time to collaborating with other executives and business leaders and how they could get a solid understanding of the subject and contribute substantially to the resolution of the problem and even become advocates of the initiative. To avoid generalization and be more specific, let’s pick the CFO as t ..read more

As technology companies continue to deliver innovative products, often on very tight deadlines and with limited budgets (especially now, in the post-zero interest rates era), they also accumulate one natural byproduct —the infamous technical debt. The Real Impact of Technical Debt on Business Technical debt is the sum of various trade-offs made while building and maintaining the product and all the things that should have been applied to the system but were not. While most seasoned software engineers have a good grasp of technical debt and know how to address it, they would likely invest more ..read more

We’ve finally launched Smily (formerly BookingSync) Engineering Blog which I’m going to primarily focus on instead of this blog here. If you enjoyed the content of my personal blog, make sure to check Smily blog as it’s going to be even better ..read more

Recently, in BookingSync, we were performing a migration from Karafka 1.4 to 2.0, which we use for communication with Kafka. One of the great features available in version 1.4 was a custom partition assignment strategy for consumers. It was particularly useful for us as we’ve had some topics that had a way higher throughput than the other ones, so just a round-robin strategy with even distribution of topics for consumers was not a suitable choice as we needed dedicated consumers for these specific topics/partitions. Unfortunately, custom partition assignment strategy for consumers is no longer ..read more

Service objects and/or after_commit callbacks are ubiquitous in most real-world Rails applications. Whether it’s a good idea or not (ActiveRecord callbacks - I’m looking at you) is a different story, but one thing that is notoriously overlooked in the application design is reliability. And yes, the service objects are equally bad as after_commit callbacks in that regard. Let’s explore the concept of reliability and also some solutions that can help solve the problem. Using transactions and reliability Typically, after_commit callbacks are used for executing side effects after the transaction ..read more

Recently, I’ve had an unfortunate opportunity to deal with a very unexpected issue with Kafka that had quite terrible consequences. The exact origin of the issue is yet to be discovered; nevertheless, the process leading to the final solution to the problem and the fix itself were interesting enough that I decided to write a quick blog post about it as it might be potentially valuable to someone who also encounters a similar problem. How the issue was diagnosed Suddenly, after one of the deployments (nothing related to any change around Kafka or karafka/ruby-kafka gems that we use in the app ..read more

Imagine that you are building a separate application for your e-commerce system dedicated to business intelligence. In other words, you want to calculate some stats for the orders. So you are going to create some new model, like OrderStat(s), and have a separate Postgres database for a new app. Sounds trivial so far. However, how are you going to get the data from the actual Orders? One way of doing that would be to do some data liberation and stream all Orders (or events related to orders) into Kafka and let the consumers get the data from Kafka. If that’s ever your plan to have Kafka in your ..read more

This is the fourth and also the last part of the Kafka For Rubyists mini course. If you are interested in other parts of the course, please check them out here. 4. Advanced Karafka Video Slides ..read more

This is the third part of the Kafka For Rubyists mini course. If you are interested in other parts of the course, please check them out here. 2. Advanced Kafka Video Slides ..read more

This is the second part of the Kafka For Rubyists mini course. If you are interested in other parts of the course, please check them out here. 2. Consuming and Performance Video Slides ..read more