Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Cassandra is a kick-ass NoSQL database. Battle tested by Netflix, Apple, Uber and so many great cloud scale companies. If you want to run Cassandra in production you need to buy DataStax Enterprise or engineer your own solution - since Cassandra community is not enough. My company loves open source and my customers love open as well so we decided to build our own Cassandra orchestrator for a lack of better name we called it CM(Cassandra Manager).  CM runs on AWS(Ec2) and managed single and multi-region clusters for Cassandra. CM has java interfaces so even today it just runs on AWS it could easily be ported to in containers or other fabric runtimes, which may happen on the long-term future. So it might sound crazy when you think about to build engineering around Cassandra but is actually not several companies in Silicon Valey like Netflix and outside of the valley do similar things or Databases being NoSQL or Relational. Automation is must if you want to scale, a...

Go is a great language for writing tooling. It's very easy to produce a self-contained binary in go which makes very easy to distributed tools written in go. Today I want to show how easy is to write a simple REPL in Go. REPLs are quite popular in Functional Programming community like Scala, Clojure, and Haskell. Today even Java has a REPL :-). Cassandra has interesting REPL called CQLSH  which allow local and remote connections. Currently, I'm thinking to write REPLs for some things I´m working with. REPLs are great for productivity and context. No to mention the could reduce and simplify discovery and troubleshooting. You might be thinking Gosh to write a REPL is tough we need to have parsers, print things nicely with colors, use tab completion, remember all previous commands. and one and on... I'm a full fledge REPL might require more work however a basic and simple version is something we can do in less them 5 minutes so I won't be doing any complicated parser or...

Today I want to share some experiences and findings in regards to Code Review. Code Review is a practice that everybody does it today. I was doing code review way before Github existed. I will share experiences before Github and after Github. Difference companies and different teams have different realities and preferences. I don't think there is universal or wrong but this is my experiences. I never was and still not a big fan of tools for code review. This subject is very related to Technical Debt. I think there are 2 kinds of technical debt the one you pay often and the ones you need to schedule because they are big and might need lots of time to fix it. However, if you just managed tech debts often means you never pay it. Also, you should be paying even if no one outside of the team is asking for it. When you are doing a PR is a good time to pay some debts related to that PR, also long as is not too much. I found Github view for code review very limiting. ...

Cats is a library for Functional Programming in Scala. The name come from the Inspiration by the Category Theory  so Cats is short for Category Theory. Cats are about types, Type System and having abstractions to make it easy to work with them. If you want to go to the next level of function programming Cats is the way to go, however, I need to say that it's hard, get the ideas to take time, understand the terms, principles, and applications takes times as well. At the end of the day, this is about style so there is no right or wrong. Recently I made a post about Monads so it might be useful for you to read it if you did not read it yet. This post won't be monad heavy but reading about monads will make it easy to understand some things here. It's fine if you don't understand everything, I'm 100% sure I don't understand everything and there are lots of ideas and concepts that I still learning. So this takes time. I don't think this is something...