For me the best way to learn something new is to actually build something with it. Yes, there is some hype around Zig nowadays (Ghostty, Bun are build in Zig), but don’t listen to it, go try it out and see for yourself if it solves your problem or not.

On May 30th, 2024, me and my friend/colleague Julien posted our first article on packagemain.tech which is a Substack newsletter where we want to share real world experiences and knowledge about Backend Development, Go, DevOps, Cloud, Kubernetes, Databases and more. We’ve been writing articles almost every week since then and we are very happy with the progress we have made so far.

In some cases your application doesn’t need Redis, and internal in-memory map with locks and expiration will suffice.

For example you already know the size of the map and you don’t need to store a lot of data. Use cases could be IP rate limiting, or any other short-lived data.

Recently I’ve been motivated to learn more about functional programming and the name OCaml came up quite a few times. I have seen some praise about it from the people I follow on social media and decided to give it a try. I finally finished a small project in OCaml and would like to share my first impressions while the memory is still fresh.

In the beginning at Solsten our engineering team focused on building products, tools, services but we never had the time to measure what was going on in our platform (it was an early-stage startup). Even though we had a feeling of what was right or not thanks to our customers, the pain grew too strong and forced our department to allocate time in order to measure things.

Do you know this feeling when you re-organize your room or house or move to a new place? It’s refreshing, isn’t it? You get a new energy, and it feels like you get more ideas in this updated environment. Yes, maybe it is hard to find things at first, because they’re not where they used to be. But it’s a small price to pay for the benefits of a change of scenery, which can be a great source of inspiration.

Oh, log, a nerdy scribe,
In you, all errors hide.
To write it well - not an easy quest,
Let's see how we can do it best!

True hackers always start with print()
Don't judge! They've got no time this sprint.
But push to prod - a fatal flaw.
Use proper logger - that's the law!

Distinguish noise from fatal crash -
Use Info, Error, Warn, and Trace.
Put a clear level in each line,
To sift through data, neat design!

You log for humans, this is true...
But can a machine read it too?
Structure is key, JSON, timestamp...
Grafana tells you: "You're the champ!"

Events, like books, have start and end.
Use Spans to group them all, my friend.
Then take these Spans and build a tree,
We call it Trace, it's cool agree?

Redact your logs: remove emails,
addresses, PII details.
Or data breach is soon to come,
and trust me, it's not fun :(

In modern distributed world,
Do centralize your logs, my Lord.
Retention policy in place?
Or cloud bill you will embrace!

(No LLMs have been used to write this)

Over the past few months, I saw a growing amount of posts on X about the Gleam language (probably the X algorithm doing its thing), and decided to give it a try. I was not disappointed, with few exceptions.

Ebiten is an open source game library in Go for building 2D games that can be ran across multiple platforms. Ebiten games work on desktop, web browsers (through WebAssembly), as well as on Mobile and even on Nintendo Switch.

Logging is a very essential part of large software, it’s hard to overstate the importance of logging, be it performance metrics logging, error logging, or debug logging for troubleshooting later.