Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Quality often means something different to each person. My definition of quality revolves around technical excellence. To achieve this, we need good architecture, sound design based on strong principles, good code, tests in a wide variety and diversity, and proper observability. To get there, we need refactoring(a lot), and I would also include good troubleshooting and review sessions.  Quality involves not only delivering automated product deployments but also ensuring the software is maintainable. Delivering software on time is not enough, and delivering value to the customer is not enough either because people and software are expensive. We need to do better.  Quality needs to be built-in, a strong, solid lean principle. However, we don't have as many incentives to built-in quality as we do for finishing projects on time. Projects are always associated with direct value to the company, and quality is often optional and mismanaged. Quality does not mean QA, and it's way beyo...

If you look up on dictionary.com the first two definitions of state are: the condition of a person or thing, as with respect to circumstances or attributes: a state of health. The condition of matter with respect to structure, form, constitution, phase, or the like: water in a gaseous state. Software is all about data, which is the state. The state could be your basic data, such as your name, last name, address, phone, email, bank account ID, or any other IDs and information you might have. Buying software has many side effects, many of which  are negative . Such data needs to be captured somewhere, usually in a relational database. But it could be in any other data store like a NoSQL Database like Cassandra, a K/V store like Redis, or an object store like S3. Ideally, the state should be contained and even isolated. However, in distributed systems, we often need a distributed state. The state is necessary. However, we might create additional complexity if we don't deal with the s...

Service contract design is hard. People do it all the time, but it is not always correct. Most of the time, engineers pay more attention to the service's internal implementation than the contract. A Service contract is the most important part of a service. A good contract provides an abstraction that allows us to have flexibility and allow future refactoring without impacting clients. Being able to refactor code without breaking consumers is pure gold. It's priceless. Not all industries are the same; however, the more dynamic and agile the industry is, the more you need to be able to do Refactoring. To do refactoring more often, you need to make decisions that allow refactoring to happen at a lower cost. If the price of refactoring is always high, no refactoring will happen, and that is game over; that is how we create inadequate legacy systems. A service contract provides a high level of abstraction(ideally) or might(if they do a poor job) leak internal implementation details....

We are in the holiday season. You walk into any Starbucks and see the Christmas decorations. Lights and Christmas trees are everywhere, and the advent of code is still rolling. Whether Xmas is summer or winter, You can get some specials and flavors only on Xmas. Now, you must wonder if this is a technical blog post; yes, 100% it is. I promise there will be a point at the end. Let's imagine a very different coffee shop experience; in reality, it's not how I will describe it, but hopefully, it will help you to see my point. I'm pretty sure you've gone to a coffee shop before; how it works is simple: you look many for what coffee + snacks you want, you get in line, pay at the cashier, and then the barista will brew you coffee, warm your food, and you will be good to go. If it is a good place, they will call you by name. Now, let's imagine a very different experience. Consider this the upside-down Xmas experience. However, if you want to name it, I will give you my nam...

Distributed Monoliths are the predominant form of modern legacy systems. Sometimes distributed monoliths are created by teams misapplying microservices architecture due to lack of isolation or internally shared libraries break of isolation. Other times, there is just the proverbial no time to refactor. Let's share the database. However, sometimes distributed monoliths happen due to non-obvious reasons from decisions that, at first glance, sound like good ideas and are even far away from engineering.  In software, we often run a trade-off analysis, Build vs Buy, where we must decide whether to build or buy software. Buying is usually attractive because it gives some speed (since you don't need to code it). Building, of course, takes longer, and you will need to maintain it; there is a chance of the project failing, and you invest money and have no software. There are trade-offs between building and buying. However, people often think buying has no implications and is much better...

Every single day, engineering teams need to do magic. Such magic manifests in several different shapes and forms. It could be by making hundreds of assumptions, figuring out what to do with little to zero context, and delivering decent solutions with proper architecture, design, comprehensive testing, and value via continuous delivery. It's a lot. In reality, most industries use Scrum/SAFE, which is far from the best way to work. In theory, when you are doing Scrum, if you do not finish a story during the spring, it's not a big deal; you go to the next one, shift the stories to the following spring, and it's all good. However, in reality, it is not exactly like that, unfortunately. That happens for various reasons: ignorance of what proper agile looks like, irrational pressure, industry pressure, and hundreds of other uncontrolled and hidden variables. Lean is all about learning to see waste, remove it, optimize it, and improve it with more quality. Companies, unfortunately...

There are many programming languages. Most of them are based on C. However, there are a few different schools of thought. There are imperative, object-oriented, and functional schools and a couple of branches and variations, but that's the mainstream of languages you will see in production in big companies. Programming languages is how we express our intents and turn that intent into value for people. Usually, people are concerned about how other engineers would read the code, make sense of it, and be able to effectively maintain it. System programming languages like C and Zig tend to focus more on performance over abstractions (which always have a cost). Object-oriented programming languages like Java focus more on structure and how to abstract things. Abstractions are not necessarily bad if done right. They have a cost and impact on the people who maintain them. Having more abstractions on the SDK or standard library is a good thing for mantainance and increases people's kno...