The road to microservices

Tech conferences piling up presentations from large cloud-native companies, shiny new frameworks, consulting firms building up their portfolios, software engineers discussing how to ride the hype at the coffee machine… Microservices are everywhere. A lot has already been said and written about them, often making microservices look like a silver bullet. But why leave the comfort of the well-known, sometimes layered, sometimes modularized, monolithic architecture? Do you really need what microservices offer? Are you really ready to lose what microservices sacrifice? This article tries to summarize my view on the “microservices compromise”, what it requires and what it implies, beyond splitting a codebase into small pieces.

For the road to microservices is dark and full of terrors.

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New photography gear - Nikon Z6II!

After 8 years with my Nikon D5100 reflex, I thought it was time to upgrade. I am still deeply convinced that, in most conditions, a mid-level reflex camera is more than enough to get the perfect shot. After all, composition, exposure and depth of field are a matter of technique and have almost nothing to do with the camera.

But after 23077 shutter clicks, I wanted to go full-frame and have the right tool for any condition: low light, rain, long exposure, high ISO…

I will keep great memories of my D5100, exploring Paris at night, shooting models in a closed theater, capturing the Milky Way at the top of a remote Corsica mountain with a friend… And soaking my telephoto lens (the Vibration Reduction module has never been the same!) during a solo trek in Iceland! Don’t worry though, the D5100 is still going strong and already started a new life with its new owner!

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Google Kubernetes Engine, CircleCI and Traefik for a full-fledged GitOps platform in the cloud

As teams start new projects, they usually waste precious time deploying and configuring a CI/CD pipeline from scratch. At Zenika Labs, our goal is to deliver proofs of concept or minimum viable products as efficiently as possible, without compromising on quality.

This guide describes how to set up, in probably less than an hour, the infrastructure supporting the development workflow we use every day to build, test and deploy our projects.

Continue reading on dev.to or the Zenika blog. The guide and its resources are also on GitHub.

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Getting Things Done with Gmail

This post, originally published in 2017 as “Getting Things Done with Inbox” has been updated to reflect the shutdown of Google Inbox in March 2019 and the addition of its main features to Gmail.

As a software developer, I read and reply to a large number of emails. Counting both my professional and personal accounts, I go through about a hundred emails every day, even though I don’t spend more than 30 minutes in my mailbox. I am usually very quick to answer, I don’t “lose” emails, and I don’t let them interrupt me. For that, I fully rely on some core ceatures of Gmail. In this article, I will discuss fundamental issues of emails as we know them, then explain how David Allen’s GTD (“Getting Things Done”) method tackles these issues. Finally, I will describe how Gmail can be used as an easy and very efficient implementation of this time management system.

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The 3 levels of understanding

In the last couple of years, I have been a reader, a student, an apprentice, a researcher, a speaker, a trainer, and above all a passionate debater. These activities have something in common: they are all in some way about teaching and learning. Like most people, I did not need a lot of time in school to believe that there are good teachers and bad teachers. But it took me years to understand that it is actually all about good and bad ways to understand things. This article is a lot about learning, and a bit about teaching if you see it as the action allowing others to learn efficiently.

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