Tamerlan Gudabayev

Career

The Specialization Trap: The Number 1 Mistake Developers Make

I've never specialized in one field. I've worked with frontend, backend, DevOps, and a bit of QA. I now develop tools in my company to make other developers more productive. Creating tools is the most fun I had with software engineering. But it wouldn't have been possible if I specialized

Devops

An Introduction to Internal Developer Platforms

These days, developers have a lot of cognitive load. You’re not just writing code, you’re playing around with cloud providers, troubleshooting Kubernetes, managing observability tools, making sure that your software is compliant with security best practices, and so much more… It’s not only you. It’s everyone

Writing

Blogging as a Software Engineer: Lessons Learned From 90+ Articles

Writing has single-handedly been the most important skill I’ve ever learned. But at the beginning, I didn’t think much of it. I just wanted to share my knowledge and simply write. That was 3 years ago, I remember I had barely 1 year of professional experience. It was

Devops

An Introduction to Site Reliability Engineering

A lot of software engineers forget why their software is successful. (or why it's not). The #1 reason is that your customers love your software. But making good software is hard, the stars must align. Things such as tech, product, marketing, and sales all come together. On the tech side,

Random

How I Stopped Daydreaming and Started Living a More Fulfilling Life

I've always been a daydreamer. I don't know how common it is with people but I've always struggled with it. I imagine scenarios where I save the day or problems to solve. I don't know when it started but I've come to the realisation that I have to fix it.

Cloud

Load Balancing 101: How It Works and Why It Matters for Your Platform

Starting this year, I felt out of control of my life. Things were moving but it all felt a bit too much. I had no balance. I was trying to focus on 100 different things at once. It was only when I narrowed my focus on a few core things

Random

Thoughts on ChatGPT and How I use it

When ChatGPT came out, I used it a lot. From my job to my writing and fitness. But then I started to notice that I'm becoming dumber. Also, my ego got in the way, I was like "Huh, I should be able to solve this myself without ChatGPTs help" So

Backend

How to Set Up NGINX Load Balancing: A Step-by-Step Guide

In the last article, I talked about load balancing in the context of Kubernetes. This time, we will talk about something simpler. NGINX. Da dum. Don't get scared, it may seem daunting at first but it doesn't have to be. That's why I wrote this article. To provide you with

Devops

Load Balancing in Kubernetes: A Step-by-Step Guide

Load balancing is the process of distributing network traffic equally over a set of resources that support an application. Modern applications must process millions of users simultaneously and return the correct data in a fast and reliable way. To do that we distribute the network traffic equally which will result

Devops

Designing Developer Friendly Self-Service Platforms

Imagine that you're a DevOps developer. Everyone keeps asking you to do something. "Hey, can you help me deploy this?" "Hey, something broke in production and I have  to roll back, can you help me do that?" "Hey, can you set up monitoring on my project?" The usual response would

The ABCs of System Design: A Beginner's Guide

Have you ever wondered how complex systems are built in companies like Google, Netflix or Amazon? The answer is good system design. System design is both the art and science of creating scalable, reliable and efficient systems that can handle large volumes of users and data. However, designing a complex

Backend

Microservices Principles: Decomposition

You were tasked with creating a new project. As this project's scope is enormous, you decide to separate the components. You tell yourself, "Wow, finally I'm one of those cool developers that work with microservices". But you quickly fall into your first problem. How the hell am I going to

Golang

Creating RESTful APIs using Go, GORM, and PostgreSQL

One of the most common uses for Go is in making backend services. This mostly includes creating RESTful APIs. (If you are not familiar with RESTful APIs, here's an awesome video by IBM explaining it.) What is a REST API?Learn more about about APIs: http://ibm.biz/guide-to-apisLearn more

Devops

An Introduction to DORA Metrics

Why should we care about metrics? Because it tells us whether we are moving forward or backwards. In the world of DevOps, we use the DORA metrics. That's what we will talk about today. Today you will learn: * What are DORA metrics? * Why do we need them? * The benefits of

Devops

Kubernetes for Dummies

The software world has changed since the increase in the popularity of containerisation. Technologies such as Docker are widely used to manage and spin up containers quickly. It has been used in big companies such as Google but they had one big issue. There were just too many containers. Companies

Book Summaries

Working Effectively with Legacy Code: Chapter 9 Summary

Back at it again, this week we will cover chapter 9 of the book titled "I can't get this class into a test harness". Sometimes it's just hard. But if it were easy then everyone would do it!! Okay, I'm sorry that sounds a bit cheesy. Anyways this chapter goes

Book Reviews

Unconditional Parenting — Book Review #1

Welcome to my new series on books. I like to read books and figured out why don't I reinforce what I learn by writing about it. So here it is. The first book I would like to review is called Unconditional Parenting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can check the book on Amazon

Book Summaries

Working Effectively with Legacy Code: Chapter 8 Summary

In legacy code, one of the most important considerations is that we don't have tests around much of our code. What's worse, is that getting them in place is difficult. That's why many people are tempted to go back to the techniques we learned in the last chapter (sprouting and

Testing

API Performance Testing using k6

Early on in my career, I was working on an e-commerce site. Everything was going fine, features were being delivered, and everything seemed to work in production. Until the equivalent of Black Friday came to Kazakhstan. First, the site was slow. Then, it was an error 503 Site not Available

Book Summaries

Working Effectively with Legacy Code: Chapter 7 Summary

How long does it take for you to make a change? If I ask this to 100 different people, I will get 100 different answers. The answer varies widely. So in projects with unclear code, many changes take a long time. On the other hand, in clearer areas, this can

Protocols

The Beginner's Guide to gRPC with Examples

Nowadays most systems are distributed. Meaning that the system is separated into multiple components that lie on different machines. But have you ever thought about how do they communicate with each other? How does service A use a class that lies in service B's codebase? One way to do that

Book Summaries

Working Effectively with Legacy Code: Chapter 6 Summary

You might ask me? Is doing all this additional work worth it? Do I need to test all my code? Do I need to break all these dependencies? You might be wondering whether it’s worth doing these things right now. The truth is, the work that you do to

Testing

Contract Testing For Dummies

Nowadays service-oriented applications are becoming very popular. There is no "one" backend. There are multiple services that all communicate with each other. This is all nice and dandy but when you get into the details it gets a bit messy. One of the common fallacies is how do you test

Book Summaries

Working Effectively with Legacy Code: Chapters 4 and 5 Summary

When people first start writing tests, they will notice how horrible code is structured for them. In general, this is true most of the time, except when you write tests along with the code which is called Test Driven Development. I personally think it's a thing that every developer goes

Book Summaries

Working Effectively with Legacy Code: Chapter 3 Summary

In the last chapter, we covered the refactoring process. We declared that the most important step in refactoring is testing. So why don't people write more tests? The simple answer is because it's hard. The reason why it's hard is because of dependency management. This basically means that to test