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2 posts tagged with "systemdesign"

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Thoughts on observability

· 4 min read

Everything is complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness.

Debugging microservices application based on scarce information is one of those cases that I don't wish anyone. But it is how it is at my current project, so management started to put some measures in motion.

I reaserched topic a bit at work and a bit on my own and I have something to share - OpenTelemetry is the future. Bu it is still work in progress.

In this post I will tell you everything I learned.

Reflections after writing simple Spring Boot library

· 4 min read

Sometimes learning from adversity is better than trying to avoid it. Taking it into careful consideration provides valuable lessons that will support you in the future.

I appreciate my job for one particular thing. That is, it provides steady steam of difficult problems that challenge my intellect. Recently I tried to wrap my head around problem how to write tests for semi-large Spring Boot codebase and refactor it (with no tests whatsoever).

I started from the assumption that when you don't have any legacy tests at hand first you write them. How can you know you don't break functionality without running the tests? But the code was very unfriendly and writing them would require writing mocks.

So I thought - why not automate stuff a little bit:

  • instrument given beans with reflection
  • dump args and results to json
  • load json directly in tests instead of writing mocks in plain Java