Blog on Alexander Sulim

Why do I write tests?

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 06:46:53 +0200

Recently I had an interesting conversation with colleagues on the topic of writing tests for code. In particular, it was about tests for hotfixes that need to be deployed as soon as possible. In this post, I’ll leave the results of that conversation aside and focus on what it inspired me to think about. On the question “Why do I write tests for code?”

How we started a podcast

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 16:00:39 +0200

A week ago my friend Pablo and me released the very first episode of Code && Beyond. None of us had any experience in podcasting or ever worked with voice and audio. But we did that!

Becoming a software engineer

Sun, 06 Jun 2021 06:34:07 +0200

Recently I realized that a professional career started for me twenty years ago. However the journey of becoming a software engineer begins much earlier, and the first sparkle of interest wasn’t created by a computer itself.

The story starts for me with a book.

A hacker mindset

Fri, 21 May 2021 14:27:59 +0200

Wikipedia defines the term “hacker” as “a computer expert who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.”.

So it’s about that mindset.

Welcome to Vim... again

Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post is written in Vim. I use this editor for the last five months, but it’s my sixth attempt to tame it. Let me share a few lessons learned and reflect on the experience.

The excitement of making things real

Fri, 07 May 2021 12:38:33 +0200

A software engineer career started for me in 2001 when I joined a tiny start-up company as a junior developer. Since then I was working in different companies and different roles. There is one thing that is still every time magical and makes me feel like a kid.

Teaching kids responsibility

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Not being able to leave an apartment for a couple of weeks due to a COVID-19 quarantine is hard. Going through that with a six years old kid is a real challenge.

To keep being happy we were trying different activities (reading, drawing, doing crazy indoor sports challenges, and so on). One of these activities was video games. That’s how my son Tim and I discovered an amazing game - “Alba: a wildlife adventure” from ustwo games.

AWS Lambda or Amazon Lambda?

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As a cloud platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 175 services. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that people often do mistakes in the names of these services. For example they say Amazon Lambda instead of AWS Lambda, or AWS DynamoDB instead of Amazon DynamoDB.

While it’s important to use correct names and terms, it’s also hard or at least tricky sometimes. I’ve created a little tool to help with that and made it open source.

LGTM: a Chrome extension

Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you don’t know LGTM is an initialism of “looks good to me”.

A few days ago, while going through my Twitter timeline, I spotted one tweet that turned on the bulb above my head. I was instantly inspired! 💡

Passwordless authentication: one step further

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today it is hard to image an app or a website on the internet that does not require authentication. Usually a sign-up form have at least two fields —- email and password. That immediately brings two problems:

The password should be strong enough otherwise it does not make sense to have it at all.
The email address must be kept secure because it is user’s private information.