/blog

So today I didn’t feel like ranting on anything so I thought I’d actually give people some useful stuff. This article is about the unsung heroes tucked away in my Chrome menu or sitting near the address bar, doing their thing. I have a list of extensions that I’ve carried with me over the years, and in this article I am going to share them, with a brief description. Productivity This is a category of extensions whose use spans across all my activities.

Last week while working on a client project, I hit some serious dead end. A memory leak! It’s been a while since I saw one of those. After 10 minutes of chewing on the code, Webpack decided to throw up and leave me with nothing more than this V8 heap dump. See the dump in this GitHub gist. It hit me like a hammer in the head. What the hell was I doing wrong?

Backing up is like investing The quote above is from this article on the Backblaze blog. It stuck with me because I’ve been a very poor investor. Not anymore! I need a backup solution and I’m looking to learn more about the process. While working on this, I caught myself thinking about the process I have been using for the past 5 years. I realized I never wrote about it and I would love to share it with the world.

Someone commented on my previous article but deleted the comment before I could approve it and give a reply. So, it’s apples fault you don’t do backups? The author was right. It’s not Apple’s fault I didn’t back up my data. But it’s Apple’s fault for sending crappy updates on 2000+ EUR computers with 1-month old OSes installed and totally mess them up. Glad we got that out of the way.

Long story short: Thanks to a stupid update pushed by Apple to my computer I was not able in any way, shape or form to access my laptop and save my work, yesterday evening. The problem is that I have to do some client work tomorrow. So I had to choose between deleting my work and re-installing the system, or waste tomorrow, trying to figure out how to save my work (an entire week’s worth of work).

If you’re working with almost any AGILE methodology you probably know what a Spike is. For those of you that don’t know, here’s a definition straight out of THE AGILE DICTIONARY: A task aimed at answering a question or gathering information, rather than at producing shippable product. Sometimes a user story is generated that cannot be well estimated until the development team does some actual work to resolve a technical question or a design problem.

Do you ever solve hard to crack client problems on your own time? This happens to me all the time. I work on some personal, meaningless task and come to the realization that I can use the solution to solve some difficult client problem. Do I bill the client for it? Hell no! Would I like to bill that time? Of course I would. But it’s not something you can easily define / delineate.

Remember that manager who asked: — Hey Adrian, we have this thing the client wants. How long do you think it would take? — I don’t know. I’d have to think about it. — Off the top of your head. Give me a number. We’ll discuss it later. — I think it would take 4 days, max. — KTHNXBYE! You know that’s the end of the discussion. Your only “later” discussion will be about the 2 weeks you spent on that task and how much longer do you think it would take.

Learn how to quickly set up a local RabbitMQ cluster using nothing more than the official RabbitMQ Docker image. I will show you two versions that you can use to launch the cluster: one using docker run and the other using docker-compose. You’re going to learn how to enable clustering in RabbitMQ, how to make Docker containers work with each other as well as how to easily test a RabbitMQ infrastructure without even having to install RabbitMQ.

Let me show you how important it is to follow a process. I will run you through examples from cinematography, painting and automotive and prove to you that even the “industries” most dominated by randomness and hazard rely on pretty strong processes and practices. 🔗 Links for the lazy people 🍹☀️ Why Michelangelo Antonioni is the Master of Compositions Stanley Kubrick - The Cinematic Experience Stanley Kubrick: Practical Lighting Stanley Kubrick and Visual Storytelling Credits & inspiration 🙏 Pablo Picasso Images Heat movie scene “Look at me” Robert De Niro Leave Britney alone John DeLorean documentary 20 hidden jokes & cryptic metaphors in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE clockwork orange singing in the rain Symmetry in Films : Supercut Why Michelangelo Antonioni is the Master of Compositions Amazing One-Man-Band Street Performer in Croatia (Cigo Man Band) Photo credits: