Almost everyone knows GTD. It is the acronym of “Getting Things Done” which is a productivity framework introduced by David Allen in his book “Getting Things Done (2002) - The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”.
The key reason to have a such framework is that our mind is great at creating stuff, but it’s terrible at tracking it. And yet there’s a good chance you’re tracking tons of stuff in your head right now. Stuff that drains your energy and clogs your creativity.

I became a GTD user during a period in which I was so full of things to do that I couldn’t work well. Just keeping the task list in mind completely occupied my brain and I could no longer concentrate on the task in progress.
I GTD love it since it keeps track of my tasks and allows me to focus on each one of them individually. Also, it allows me to work on several workstreams (or projects) during the same period (e.g. a quarter).

As a software engineer, if you’re reading this, for sure you already know that the error budget is defined when we select a Service Level Indicator (SLI) and for it set a target Service Level Objective (SLO) over a specific time period. If you don’t, head to the “references” section below which suggests introductory resources.

How fast can we consume the error budget? This question was not easy to answer for me. That’s why I’d like to share my notes.

My MacOS Monterey Setup

I think you are supposing I am a macOS fan… but I am not! Linux is my favourite OS, so why I spent time customizing macOS? I am also a software developer and, like many others, I have been asked to use macOS.

The experience was very frustrating at the beginning and I suspect the main issue was the entire Mission Control system. Typical questions: “Where is the window I opened a moment ago?”, “Why the order of the spaces keeps changing?”, “Do I really need those fancy animations?”.
Then I spent a couple of days in macOS customization and I’d like to thank the other blogger who shared their configs. The result is a Windows/Linux-like desktop setup, that tries to leverage default macOS behaviour as much as possible. In the specific, I mean a setup that is fast, keyboard-centric and without distractions.
Now, let’s describe the setup in detail following a recipe-style format so I (and you) can re-execute the same recipe if I’ll need it.

I am trying how the git cherry-pick commands works and, in the specific, I am wondering if it is suitable to copy commits amongst two different repositories that are sharing only the first part of the git log history. Let’s start by creating two new repositories named repo_A and repo_B.

This story will show you how to use Netcat to send and receive TCP/UDP packets.
We’ll focus on a specific example… we’ll simulate a Statsd client/server.

What is Netcat? Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol. Designed to be a reliable “back-end” tool, Netcat can be used directly with other programs and scripts to send files from a client to a server and back. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool that can specify the network parameters while also establishing a connection to a remote host via a tunnel.

Do you have fun while programming? Maybe you do think it is quite strange… Well, it’s not! Just think of competitive programming, that is defined as “mind sport”. An example is Code Wars, a website that provides a large collection of coding challenges submitted and edited by their the community. But it is not the only one, there are a lot of other examples.

I still remember when I joined the Hotels.com™ (part of Expedia Group™) technology team and how excited I was to start such a new challenge. Since the very early days, I noticed that working in a global company is quite different from working in the same building. That is obvious, I know, but it wasn’t easy to get used to the new way of working.

I missed getting in touch with new teammates, and sometimes felt isolated from others and had the feeling of being a remote worker. Later on, only when I started working from home for 2 days per week, I realized that working in a global team has a lot in common with the remote work.

Using microservices is mainstream nowadays and them bring several challenges for the software engineers: operations and infrastructure, security, monitoring, caching, fault-tolerance, and so on.
In particular, having under control the communication between microservices is the key to build reliable reliable services.

In the Java world there are around several solutions for this purpose but, in this post, I’d like to analyze how Hystrix leverage the “command pattern” to accomplish this goal.

Nowadays, most blogs are powered by Wordpress. I am a Wordpress users too and I have to admit it is really a great for blogs.
As others CMS, Wordpress requires a database and PHP in order to process the dynamic pages server-side.
Jekyll is a static site generator. With it I can generate all my blog pages in on my computer and then publish the entire website on a static hosting server.

Da REST a GraphQL in 90 minuti

21 Dicembre 2017, Hotels.com Technology Rome Office

Il team HCOM technology di Roma vorrebbe condividere con voi le esperienze fatte con GraphQL, e discutere su come questo linguaggio possa essere favorito rispetto all’ormai consueto paradigma REST.

Durante l’incontro faremo una introduzione ai principi base di GraphQL, parleremo di come si definisce uno schema per descrivere i dati e di come è poi possibile eseguire delle interrogazioni su di esso. Subito dopo seguirà una parte pratica durante la quale implementeremo un servizio GraphQL utilizzando l’implementazione javascript.