We performed a migration to Java 11 and a bug fix about negative symbol for negative numbers in Java ruined our implementation. This article describes the situation and the lessons learned.

I'm building a small application to give treats to my dog in a remote manner. I setup a Raspberry Pi with a very basic HTTP server connected to a servo motor that will open or close the deposit where the treats are stored. In this article I'll explain all the challenges I found to make this application standalone.

While the development of https://www.agalera.eu/standalone-app-raspberry-pi/ I needed to use python's BaseHttpServer and inject some dependencies into it. It turns out, there's no easy way of doing that. Moreover, I wanted to achieve 100% code coverage testing, so I should found a way of testing that code.

Currently we’re investigating usage of SNS to send Push notifications. We have some friends working already with Firebase and recommend us to check it out. We discovered that SNS supports sending messages to Firebase. However, not everything is as easy as it looks like.

Gitlab or any other CI/CD system works really great to have an automated build system. However, you can waste lots of time if you don’t think about carefully. Every job needs to download the build tools and dependencies, so that’s a lot of time that could be reduced. In this article I describe two techniques to avoid wasting that much time. First one is using a cache for the dependencies and the second is using a pre-built Docker image with the required build tools.