Jorgeu's code

Can’t say much about it but a new challenge is raising here. I hope I can be up to it and keep growing as a professional. 

You try to remember for how many years you’re using a particular piece of software and it goes beyond 10 years.

The importance of alarms. Don't ever underestimate them or complain about their annoyance. Put alarms for high cpu, too many calls, too few calls, disk near full, non-success return values, and more.

I was processing some logs and transformed the big script I had into a single perl script. Then noted it was taking more cpu and was slower than my previous ugly script that evaluated the main regexp with grep -P.

As usual went into stackoverflow and found this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14453584/which-is-more-efficient-perl-pattern-matching-or-grep

Basically, the default perl implementation isn't "state of the art". I'm in shock!. Fortunately, you can use a different engine like a someone suggested in a comment to the accepted answer --> https://metacpan.org/module/re::engine::RE2

Reload the page or just give it a shot or two was my testing at the beginning of my career back in 2005. At that point my code/bug ratio was huge. Most of the time were spent recompiling and running again just to go back to the code to hunt that line creating the problem.

About 2008 I move a company where I was the main developer. Maybe too soon for my experience but I felt ready for the challenge. I started to make small ephemeral integration tests in a main method to run in the command line. I didn't tested everything that way though nor call it unit or integration testing. I was still building and giving it a shot for the most part. Also, there were a lot of production testing with customer requests as recreating those scenarios had a cost. Still, testing and mocking could help.

When moved again in 2011 I finally had the chance to work in a organization where testing started to become a daily thing. Also continuous integration with hudson/jenkins. I started to capture bugs in an integration test and the fixing it. Not all the time though but I got the understanding that the bug will announce itself next time. We can pack with that subject and move to the next problem. Its like feeling freedom to break things, innovate, let the code evolve with confidence that the core components were still working correctly.

Then moved to Amazon and now I'm worried about code coverage of unit tests, accuracy of integration tests, approval tests during continuous integration, documenting how to safely deploy and verify its working on production as expected. Much more engineering, confidence, and so on. Any line of code will be executed millions of times per hour. Even smaller optimizations have a huge impact and no matter how silly a test case look, it will serve for a long time with hundreds of code changes a year.

The way I design software component changed forever. When I make a constructor my priority #1 is how the testing set up will look like. Untestable classes aren't possible anymore (like those final and that constructs its dependency inside). The holy grail is being able to mock everything outside the class. Sure, sometimes we can relax the requirement specially with legacy code.

I remember when I said I that I had not time to write code that test the code. Sure it adds extra developer hours when making changes because some tests might break here and there but now I know that manual testing + rolling back production because of an undetected bug costs way more than maintaining the test code.

Hope I were able to write this in a generic way so it can be digested by any developer no matter the language.

I will write more about it. But for now I just want to say that unit/integration testing is one of the more important skills a software engineer can have. I remember myself underestimating its impact and considering that people talking about it were charlatans. What a mistake!.

Scala, like C++, is extremely flexible in allowing you to pick and choose which 20% to use for your enterprise software needs.

Set this to make it work as the rest of the world

When working with the EC2 interface you have 2 options: low level client and the "activerecord like" instances interface.

Here is the doc for the low level client: EC2 Client

And this is for the "idiomatic" one: EC2 Instances

Is was very helpful to read these docs.

Create a new instance?