Recently my husband needed to set up a deployment pipeline for a project at work. We discussed it briefly and it made me think that I have very little experience with setting up such things from scratch. I’ve written a github action to deploy my blog to AWS, but that was a very cumbersome script. Since we have this project, I decided to go ahead and figure out a way to deploy it somewhere.
I have 15 books on various aspects of Software Engineering on my “want-to-read” bookshelf. The biggest one of them, by far, is “Systems Performance” by Brendan Gregg. I bought this book after reading “Database Reliability Engineering”. It was referenced there and seemed like the kind of book that could help me improve my lower-level technical knowledge. For example, it has a chapter on Operating Systems and the learning goals for that chapter include “understand the role of the kernel and the system calls” and “gain a working knowledge of kernel internals.” These are the kind of things I know close to nothing about.
I launched this blog last year on AWS. It was my first time using AWS so I was eligible for the Free Tier services. Running my blog cost me around $2 monthly. However, by the end of this August my AWS Free Tier expired and the expenses of running the blog rose to around $35. One third of it was for a single Linux t2.micro instance and two thirds - for the Load Balancer.
This year I have been selected as one of the experts to talk about different areas of Backend development for the mentees at WomenGoTech. I chose the topic ‘Software Architecture’ as this is something I’ve been reading a bit about recently. This was a big thing for me, as I rarely get to speak publicly. Especially for a cause that I care about so much. I invested almost 2 months (more on this in the Reflections section) for the preparation as I wanted to make the talk as good and useful as possible. And now once the talk is done I want to reflect on it a little.
My main shtick in this blog are the reviews of technical books. I’ve been reading these books from the very beginning of my career as backend software developer and formed quite a routine around it. I know people struggle sometimes with forming a learning habit, so I decided to share mine as hearing about different things that work for different people might be helpful.
I have a confession to make: I am always a bit reluctant to post content on LinkedIn. I feel like the social network is currently going through a phase Facebook has gone through several years ago: people eagerly oversharing. And I’m not sure if I want to be a part of that. But I end up posting anyway justifying myself that it is mostly professional content. And doing so turned out to be a good thing.
This site was created mostly as a learning experience. Setting it up was a complete point-and-click adventure following detailed instructions laid down by a friend of mine (more about it here). That didn’t feel like enough practice. Plus every time I write a new post, I need to scp it to the AWS instance and ssh there to move stuff around. I decided to take my learning process up a notch and write a github action to deploy the site. Moreover, this time I tried to figure things out myself instead of asking for instructions beforehand.
Some time ago I’ve been talking with a DevOps oriented friend that I feel bad about my lack of experience with lower level, more technical aspects of Software Engineering (like actually deploying an application to a server instead of just clicking a button in a CI/CD platform configured by someone else). He suggested to help and guide me through the process if I can come up with a project for myself.
This is not exactly something I’ve written. I just answered some questions about my career as backend software engineer in the Payments domain. I was asked to do this as I was one of the mentors at Women Go Tech program (a mentoring program in Lithuania dedicated to helping women start and accelerate their careers in IT and engineering). You can find the interview here.
When I just joined Vinted I got involved with different initiatives to get to know the people, processes and culture there. One of those initiatives was the review of our hiring process. While working on it I saw an article by Julia Evans “Tell candidates what to expect from your interview process”. Since I had fresh experience of Vinted hiring process from both sides I decided to write an article about it for Vinted’s engineering blog. Here it is: (Backend) Engineer Hiring Process
It has been a little more than a month now since I’ve started new job as a Ruby programmer. Only language I worked with so far has been C#, so I had zero experience with dynamic languages. Here I wanted to share the process how I managed to at least learn some basics before starting.
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