New Kids On The Block

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Opening new frontiers. That’s the feeling that I had when the CNCF promoted the opportunity to create new Community Groups across the world. I saw it on Twitter, and I thought, “what if.. ?”. Yes, there it is again, the feeling that comes together with that sentence. After that, I thought, “but it would be pretty hard to manage a Community Group only by myself…”. The rest of the story I will tell on another occasion, but the result of the whole thing is what I want to introduce to all of you today: The Cloud Native Asturias Community Group. Engage!

Cloud Native Asturias official logo

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The Butterfly Effect

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“A butterfly flaps its wings in Pekin and a storm is created in Florida“. This is one of the typical sentences heard when chaos theory comes along. How leadership and mentoring could be introduced using this concept?.

In this post, you will not find a deep analysis of the chaos theory neither the mathematical analysis from Edward Lorenz, but you will find how this theory is reflected in the leadership and mentoring aspects of professional life. Engage!.

A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3;
A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3. CC BY-SA 3.0

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Enter, The NATS

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Deliver a message from point A to point B as fast as possible. This is a requirement for humankind for a long time ago. History says there are records from 900 B.C. about Royal Post system in China to practice communication by written documents carried by an intermediary from one person or place to another. As you can imagine, since then, the way to deliver a message has been changed a lot not only the envelope but also the means of transmission.

Nowadays, in the era of communication between machines, there is still the need of delivering messages, and as fast as possible too. In some cases, you need speed, other cases you prefer to be sure about the reception of the message delivered besides the speed, and you may have many other needs. The systems to deliver messages were called just queue systems, just a couple of decades ago, but today they are frequently called message brokers.

There are several message brokers in the market in the current time. In this post, you will read about NATS. Engage!

nats.io logo

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Leading a team, not a family

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Have you ever had the feeling of belonging to a family in your workplace?. What about that sentence “we are not a company, we are a family”?. Maybe, as a leader, you had the feeling that you are failing to your team members because they are not doing what they want all the time. Within your family or your bunch, you do almost what you want to. And here is where the magic question comes. Are you leading a family, a gang of friends, or are you leading a team?

I’d like to share my vision about the important difference between leading as a family or as a team. Engage!

The Brady Bunch, Wikipedia

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Auto-Scaling No Jutsu

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You knew that could happen… it’s part of life and shit happens. Your precious distributed system has been deployed on Monday for the first time in the production environment, with real traffic, brilliant!, all good so far… and on Friday evening, “that” happened. The system starts to raise HTTP 500 status code, just dropping requests like hell, and your dashboards turn from a beautiful green to bloody red. What do you do now?

kubectl scale deployment.v1.apps/my-critial-deployment --replicas=10 #No Jutsu!!

That’s a lesson learned: Implement auto-scaling for the Kubernetes deployment by next Monday morning so I don’t have to keep an eye open on the alert system (at least for this).

In this article we will address the Kubernetes auto-scaling feature, how does it work, the complexity of this feature, and some bad practices. Engage!

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Master, you enlighten me with so little

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What a “Senior profile” means? On many of the job offers around LinkedIn and similar, when the recruiters are hiring, we can see the word “Senior” coming close to some sentences like “+5 years of experience on Java”, “+12 years of experience on Windows IIS”, “+7 years as Office Manager in a multicultural company”, “+10 years of experience on System Administrator”, “+2 months peeling potatoes” or even other unbelievable ones.

From Twitter

From that kind of job posts, we could infer that for “the market”, a Senior candidate is the one which spent, at least, some defined period of time working in a certain area. Is this the definition for a Senior profile?. Hence, if you have been working on something for many years you are “at another level” of experience.

Senior, adjetive. – high in rank or status; higher in rank or status than others

Definition from Oxford dictionary

If we focus the conversation into the technology field, does this definition of Senior fit enough with what the companies really want or need?. Engage!.

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Training Day

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Pull Requests are WELCOME! This is probably the most common sentence in the open-source world. Attending to meetups, conferences, summits, and when somebody writes any comments in Github, usually asking how to do this or that, and make feature requests, that sentence comes back to you as an implacable boomerang.

Most of the time, there is a limited number of core maintainers, for an open-source project, which work for another company trying to get a profit from this open-source project. This reduced amount of maintainers situation leads to an answer like the one mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. So you, as an open-source enthusiastic person, tell yourself, “ok, why not, I can make it!“.

Starting a collaboration in an open-source project is not easy today and many people are working to improve the experience for future contributors to get to speed as soon as possible into the projects and in the smoothest way. In this article, you will read some contribution tales and proposals to improve the early contribution of new people to open-source projects. Engage!

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Fluentd, experience in production

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Unified logging systems are increasingly being used to handle the logs from all across the platforms and the applications. These systems are becoming even more important in a cloud scenario where heterogeneous applications of any kind are used to solve the business problems at scale. This article addresses an analysis of one of these unified logging systems, Fluentd, running in real experience at scale level.

fluentd logo – Apache 2 License

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aMet El Tiempo

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In this post, I want to introduce a project implemented in 2013, during my time at university. I’m kind of proud of the work done at that time.

I was being instructed on the development for mobile devices based on Android at that time. Very excited about it since it was something new, not just another desktop or server application, something that my family or friends could use on a daily basis.

I decided to create an mobile application about weather forecast; I created aMet El Tiempo for Android.

As you can see in the screenshot, it’s a mono-language application that displays weather forecasts for Spanish cities.

One of the challenges of this application was the fact that “Ok, this is not something just to show to my teacher, it’s something that people around the world could use!”. When you realize that, it’s a game-changing, you really push yourself to go beyond your limits and try to do your best… whatever the result has come.

At the technical level, the Java language was really familiar to me at that time, even though some things were not straight forward or some Java SE libraries did not work on Android at that time.

Something was clear in mind: The feature that I wanted to include “yes or yes” was the Voice To Text. It was not so difficult to include and the result was very good.

Nowadays the development in Android has changed a lot since 2013… and I think for the good. I truly believe that implement your own application, to be offered to your family, region, the world… or just for you is a great individual exercise that any developer should do.

Happy coding!

Hello New World!

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Today it’s the beginning of something new and I think it’s the perfect moment to start something new in my professional life as well.

Today, it’s the first day, at least in Spain, of what has been called: The New Normality. This means that Spanish people passed through for a lot dur to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is not disappeared yet. I’ll not spend the rest of this post talking about the COVID-19 because there are a lot good pages in the Internet if you want to know more.

What I’m gonna do here?. I don’t know yet, to be honest with you my dear reader. I’ve achieved to have mission, which is something really important for me.

Accelerate the Knowledge of Software Development and Technical Leadership

“Ooooh”, you migh think, “sooo deep”… or maybe you think something else :). The fact is this sentence summarizes, somehow, what I want to do with this page.

I’ll not write down here all my profesional profile, you already have it at LinkedIn.

I want to write articles, research, proof of concepts, ideas that pretend to help people to improve their knowledge and motivate them. I pretend to write about Software Engineering, Software Development, Leadership, and many other “categories” related to that.

My name is Marcos Fermín Lobo and I hope you enjoy this new journey. Welcome!