When Your Microservices Need Marriage Counseling Testing microservices is like keeping a troupe of drama-prone actors in sync - miss one cue and the whole production collapses. Through years of wrestling with distributed systems (and occasionally crying in server rooms), I’ve catalogued battle-tested techniques that go beyond textbook examples. Unit Testing: The Art of Surgical Mocking Let’s start with the foundation. A well-isolated unit test is like a perfectly crafted espresso shot - small but potent....

The Clean Code Cult: When Perfect Becomes the Enemy of Good Confession: I’ve written code so clean it would make a preacher proud. But I’ve also shipped code so hacky it would make that same preacher weep. There’s a time and place for both. While Clean Code enthusiasts (and I use that term affectionately) bring valuable principles to the table, their dogmatic application often chokes startups with technical debt disguised as virtue....

Pharo is like a time machine for coding - it lets you travel through your program’s runtime while it’s still running. This modern Smalltalk dialect isn’t just a language; it’s an interactive world where your objects live, breathe, and respond to every keystroke. Let’s explore why you should give it a spin, and how to get started without losing your mind. Why Pharo? The Short Story of ‘Small Talk’ Smalltalk began as a research project at Xerox PARC in the 70s, aiming to make computers as easy to use as children’s toys....

Why Engineers Should Embrace Calculated Risk You know the drill: “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” But what happens when that ethos meets your codebase? Strategic technical debt isn’t about cutting corners - it’s about intentional trade-offs that balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability. Think of it as the software equivalent of burning the midnight oil to meet a critical deadline while planning an IV drip for the inevitable crash....

The cult of code elegance has become the software industry’s version of a never-ending pursuit of the perfect Instagrammable dish. Developers polish their code until it sparkles, only to realize it’s rarely served. Let’s break this cycle. The Elegance Trap: How Chasing Beauty Becomes Busywork We’ve all fallen for it – rewriting a function into a symphony of decorators and facades, only to realize the original solution worked just fine. Ayende’s controversial approach where he stripped away dependency injection and repositories proves elegance often masks unnecessary complexity....