Diego Pacheco Tech blog

I was always a big believer in metadata and observability. Tagging is another form of observability, the idea is very basic and yet not well explored in our industry. You add metadata to a resource. Metadata is just data that describes data. Why bother? Well, at scale, there will be hundreds to thousands of resources including ec2 machines, container images, security groups, load balancers, and all kinds of applications like services, bffs, aggregators, a much more. How do you make sense of these resources? How do you know if you need them after all? Cloud computing is great but also is a big cost center. Understanding your resources is critical, not only for savings but for better infrastructure management. Tags help with cost, but they go beyond cost.  Endless Resources So let's say you have some scale, easily you can have hundreds to thousands of ec2 and dozens to hundreds of lamdas. The first question that should come to mind is ownership, how own all these resources? By not ha...

Once upon a time, Design Patterns was a big thing. In current times, perceptions have shifted and the industry has mixed feelings about them. I've thought a lot of blogging about design patterns was worth it or not. I used a lot of patterns in my life, there were moments when I was completely okay with design patterns, and other times not so okay. I got some mixed feelings but today I think they are fine. IMHO there are some fairness and some misconceptions. There are hundreds of Design Patterns, there are patterns for everything you can imagine. Usually when people complain about patterns they are talking about OOP patterns, more specifically from the 90s book from the GOF .   Patterns are not limited to OO, there are functional programming patterns, system programming patterns, OS patterns, cloud computing patterns, frontend patterns, and mobile patterns. Lots of these patterns are very similar, at the end of the day not all problems are that different, and are all about ideas an...

Every single activity we do in engineering is an opportunity. We need to see this way, with positivity, and do more than we are asked to. That's how we improve. PRO players from football, basketball, or any pro sports, practice like there is no tomorrow. Practice or training is one dimension, and another dimension is vision, we need to be able to see things differently. For instance, we live in an attention economy , the issue with such an economy is that is shallow, so we live in a shallow attention economy. We need to start seeing the opportunities and encouraging a deep mindset instead of a shallow mindset. A shallow mindset is okay as a starting point, but quickly we need to switch to a deep mindset. It's all about vision because we can execute the very same task with completely different takes: Shallow vs Deep Mindsets. 

Testing is essential . Testing requires diversity, from integration to chaos , from your local machine to production . Writing tests not always is fun because sometimes is hard to write tests because not all contracts are good, and clean and went through a lot of thought processes. Is easy to blame the design, architecture, and even the implementation, but are we sure we are not missing anything? Something that is hard to test very likely will not be tested. Testability is a good property of any design or architecture sure. Making good solutions that are easy to test is a good thing. However, mocking is often taken for granted, meaning is seen as something that is just good and has no drawbacks, but that is not true. Everything has drawbacks. Integration tests are often seen as bad practices and people tend to lean toward unit tests instead. Just keep in mind Integration tests don't require mocks. Unit tests often require mocks to keep them isolated and cut off external dependencie...

Complexity is everywhere. Small, medium, or big company, does not matter, no one can escape complexity. Complexity just tends to get bigger, we depend on software more and more. Ask yourself, if your subscriptions on iPhone are increasing or decreasing in the last 5 years. There is more competition, and more streaming providers, and everything becomes a subscription, from grocery to transportation to even video games. Complexity increases, maintainability decreases, and maintaining software becomes harder. More software, more complexity. Complexity needs to be fought 24x7 at all times. However, how can we figure out something if we don't fully understand it? Is easy to just give up and do whatever since there is no escape, but there is a better way, we can do better. So what is complexity after all?

Security Matters. How do you know you are secure? One of the many practices is to run Threat Analysis considering attacking vectors.  Threat Modeling should be a continuous activity. Movements like DevSecOps aim to put security on the day-to-day work. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts costs will grow 15% per year over the next five years reaching 10.5 Trillion USD by 2025. Security is a never-ending game. Security is something companies will need to do forever. IF they cost more and more, maybe we should get better and learn more about security. Lack of security can destroy a brand, and damage the customer's trust and relationship with your solutions. Security is difficult because it cannot be fixed in a central place with one tool, it requires principles and continuous fighting. There are infinite amounts of attack vectors. Common attacking vectors include compromised credentials: users/passwords, weak credentials: low entropy passwords, Insider Threats: from bad actors,  Mi...

Tradeoffs are key for design and architecture. Being able to run proper tradeoffs is an important skill you should master. Decisions we make in software should happen based on tradeoff analysis. Tradeoffs are about pros and cons, which can be done with a simple list of pros and cons. However it looks simple and easy, it is way harder than it looks. Running proper tradeoffs requires knolowsge of the domain, creativity, and lots of debate club skills. Tradeoffs are about trading one thing for another like speed vs. flexibility. Tradeoffs are about balancing factors that might not be attainable at the same time like consistency and availability. Without good tradeoffs skills, we can make wrong decisions and be fooling ourselves. Tradeoffs do not require fancy tools, we can do it with pen and paper, or any plaintext editor like vim. Before we do a deep dive into tradeoffs let's understand why they matter a lot. Why do Tradeoffs Matter? Tradeoffs matter for a variety of reasons: Better ...