It has been almost six years since my last post here. Six years! When I wrote about joining Facebook back in 2020, I had no idea it would be this long before I’d write again. Life got busy, priorities shifted, and the blog quietly went to sleep. Well, it’s waking up now. What happened since 2020 A lot has changed. Facebook became Meta, and I moved from software engineering into engineering management. I currently run a team in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), where we build the data infrastructure behind Meta’s generative AI efforts - web crawlers, synthetic data pipelines, and infrastructure for AI agents. ...

It has been a while since I last time wrote a post here, hence I wanted to update you on what is happening with the website (why the lack of activity) and what’s new in my life. And there is plenty! Joining Facebook When I wrote my last blog post here (October 2019) I was in a full-on Facebook interview preparation mode. I really enjoyed my time at Scott Logic, but Facebook has been my long time dream and I decided to try to get in one more time. ...

On the 24th of September 2019, I had an opportunity to speak at the very first DevOps Roundabout meetup in London. You can watch my talk on YouTube. The idea behind this talk is the same as the one behind my whitepaper (with the identical title). First, explaining to the wider audience what the DevOps movement is really all about and then helping people to embark on that journey. The difference in the talk is that I do not focus specifically on the public sector and think in broader terms- how everyone can embark on this journey. ...

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is one of the most important services available in AWS. Most people know that you can create user accounts and assign permissions (policies). In this blog post, I will look at a few more advanced features of the AWS IAM. AWS policies can have conditions AWS policies can have conditions. That means that you can apply a policy that would only work in a specific time window. This can be for example next Wednesday between 1 pm and 4 pm if you expect a user to need specific permission around this time. In general, you can use these conditions to grant and revoke permissions to do things at specific dates and times. ...

I have been posting a little bit less recently. In some ways, it is easier to write two blog posts a week than one blog post once in a while. I have recently read the book titled “Atomic Habit” that motivated me to fix this state of affairs! As you might know, I have written over 100 blog posts in 2018 as a sort of personal challenge. It was not easy, but it was immensely satisfying! You can check out my summary post about this. ...

I am very excited to share with you my mini video course on “Code Sharing in Microservices Architecture”. The course consist of 5 videos: Microservices – Code Sharing Microservices – Sharing Libraries Microservices – Sharing Integration Code Microservices – Sharing Domain Objects Microservices – Code Sharing Summary This is the first time I have ever done anything like this, so I am looking forward to the feedback. Do you enjoy these kind of videos, would you like to see more? Which video did you like the most/the least? ...

The first language I used to write a small program was Pascal. Since then I have worked professionally with Java, JavaScript, Groovy and a few more. Currently, I am learning a bit of Go in my spare time. In this blog post, I want to encourage you to learn a new language as well and provide you with a few ideas. The more you know the easier it gets First of all, I have noticed that the more languages you already know, the easier it is to learn new ones. I guess like with everything, you start seeing familiar patterns and solutions and in general- things start to make sense much quicker. ...

Working for consultancy, I already had a chance to build microservice based systems in large financial organisations as well as public sector ones. When sharing my experience with other developers, there is one topic that often comes up- many people wished that they had a service mesh from the start! In this article, I will explain what a service mesh is and why is it so useful! Service mesh defined A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that helps with managing your service to service communication. It is often implemented as a lightweight reverse-proxy using the sidecar pattern, deployed in a separate container. The two most popular implementations are currently Istio and Linkerd (which absorbed Conduit). ...

You probably heard about Ops, DevOps, maybe even about GitOps! This short article is a “jargon buster” explaining what all these different terms mean and which ones you should pay attention to. Ops This is a shorthand for IT Operations. That means running software, providing support and administrating networks and servers. Basically most of the important day-to-day IT business that is not testing or development. An interesting, but the wrong trend these days is to simply re-name your Operations team as DevOps team, pat each other on the back and think that you are following best practices… If only life was that easy! ...

With Oracle stopping free updates for Java 8 and effectively only maintaining free updates with the latest Java release (12 at the time of writing) a natural question arises… Which JDK should I use? This is a short article providing answers, depending on your circumstances. Let’s look at different scenarios that you may be facing: You are using Java 8 and want to keep Long Term Support (LTS) for free In this case, you should use Amazon Correto OpenJDK 8 distribution. Amazon Correto is a free JDK distribution that will provide you with free long term support: ...