An FAQ about preparing and taking the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. — I passed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam in January 2021 with a score of 94%. In this article, I’d like to quickly summarize why I chose this certification program and how I prepared. I’ll answer multiple frequently asked questions and discuss if it’s a good choice for Backend/Frontend Engineers…

A story about safe and compositional resource management in vanilla Scala and cats-effect. — We’re all using resources on a daily basis. You turn on the water tap, wash your hands for at least 20–30 seconds, and turn it off. You switch the light on if it’s dark, and off when you no longer need it. Resources have a lifecycle. You open them, use…

A short read about being careful with error handling in stream design. — Akka Streams is a reasonable choice when it comes to event processing. A wide variety of connectors and integrations makes it easy to assemble a working pipeline and get up to speed quickly. On the other hand, we have a long list of predefined operators, GraphDSL, support for error handling…

Using ngrep and nginx to debug HTTPS like a pro! — Imagine you’re investigating a strange issue with a web service that talks to other services using HTTP over TLS. You want to inspect the HTTP calls it makes and what responses it gets back. …and it’s 2018, so you’re running the service in a shiny container! The first obvious approach…

Using Akka Streams to stream data from Amazon S3 to MongoDB. — This is part two of the Crafting production-ready Backup as a Service solution using Akka Streams series. I highly encourage you to read the first part first if you didn’t, since it gives an overall context. In the first part, we saw how to perform a data backup from MongoDB…

Using Akka Streams to backup MongoDB to Amazon S3. — Edit: both parts of this article are up to date as of 16 Jan 2019. Imagine you’re developing a database as a service solution like Compose or mLab. You’re hosting a horde of database instances/containers which are used by your customers. One of the key features of your solution is…