architecture microservices system design

Chopping the monolith in a smarter way

In my previous post Chopping the Monolith, I explained that some parts of a monolith are pretty stable and only the fast-changing parts are worth being 'chopped.' I turned the post into a talk and presented it at several conferences. I think it’s pretty well received; I believe it’s because most developers understand, or have direct experience, that microservices are not a good fit for traditional organizations, as per Conway’s Law. In the talk, I use an e-commerce webapp as a

Languages Design Errors Handling

A retrospective on Errors Management: where do we go from here?

Error management is a fact of life in software development as it is often inevitable and generated by different causes that also include incorrect or incomplete understanding of the requirements or even lack of knowledge of some tools or elements used during development. Let’s go on a small trip into the evolutions and different concepts related to error management, analyzing why it is difficult and why we are going in new directions after the moment of Exceptions in programming languages

OpenTelemetry DevOps

Exploring the OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector sits at the center of the OpenTelemetry architecture but is unrelated to the W3C Trace Context. In my tracing demo, I use Jaeger instead of the Collector. Yet, it’s ubiquitous, as in every OpenTelemetry-related post. I wanted to explore it further. In this post, I explore the different aspects of the Collector: The data kind: logs, metrics, and tracesPush and pull modelsOperations: reads, transformations, and writes First steps A long time ago, observabilit

APIs Web APIs HTTP APIs

API versioning

In my previous post Evolving your APIs, I mention the main API versioning approaches. During the talk of the same name, I sometimes get some questions on the subject. In this post, I’ll detail each of them. I assume readers know the reasons behind versioning, semantic versioning, and product lifecycle. If not, I encourage you to read a bit about these themes; in particular, chapter 24 of the excellent API Design Patterns book focuses on them. I’ll summarize the subject in a few wo

Rust Python pyo3

Feedback from calling Rust from Python

I got plenty of feedback on my post about Calling Rust from Python: Hacker News/r/python/r/rust Many comments mentioned pyo3, and I should use it instead of cooking my own. Thanks to the authors, I checked: in this post, I explain what it is and how I migrated my code. What is pyo3? Rust bindings for Python, including tools for creating native Python extension modules. Running and interacting with Python code from a Rust binary is also supported. — PyO3 user guide Indeed, pyo3

Python learning

Python "magic" methods - part 2

Let’s continue our exploration of Python’s magic methods in this second part of the series. This part will focus on numbers and containers, i.e., collections. You can read the first part here. Container-related methods Python provides the usual containers, e.g., lists, sets, and dictionaries. You can use the following methods when you want to implement your own. Common methods Containers have a size. Python defines two methods to implement to return the number of items in a con

Python learning

Python "magic" methods - part 1

Java was the first language I used professionally and is the scale by which I measure other languages I learned afterward. It’s an OOP statically-typed language. Hence, Python feels a bit weird because of its dynamic typing approach. For example, Object offers methods equals(), hashCode(), and toString(). Because all other classes inherit from Object, directly or indirectly, all objects have these methods by definition. Conversely, Python was not initially built on OOP principles and is

HTTP IPC FFI Rust Python

Calling Rust from Python

I recently watched GOTO conferences' talk Calling Functions Across Languages by Richard Feldman. I’m afraid I have to disagree with using the term 'language' in this context. It’s a no-brainer to call Java from Kotlin or Scala or to call Java from Kotlin. Hence, in the rest, I’ll use 'stack'. In the talk, the speaker cites two main reasons to go on this road: Gradual migration from one stack to the otherUsing a library that has no equivalent in one’s stack under the ass

performance imgproxy Apache APISIX

Resizing images on-the-fly

As a web architect, one of the many issues is asset management. And the most significant issue in assets is images. A naive approach would be to set an image and let the browser resize the image via CSS: img { height: 100%; width: 100%; object-fit: contain; } However, it means that you download the original image. It entails two problems: the size of the original image and the suboptimal browser-based resizing. This post will cover two alternatives: traditional and brand-new s