Lungelo Ximba - ThoughtEcho

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Lungelo Ximba

They have ruined one of the coolest companies in the country

Update: Since I posted this, the company has since revised the article I refer to here. The article is now more transparent and reflects reality better. I like to think this post had something to do with it I have not been inspired to write for a few years now,

Communities, Leadership & Building

Communities, Leadership & Building

Really, I think it is that simple. Just start. Everything else comes from this beginning.

Do not design systems with caches

Okay, I am just going to pretend it has not been a long while since my last post. Let's get right to it.

Speeding up HTTPS API calls with SNI

A while back Google Chrome started to treat all non-HTTPS websites as unsafe. Well, they are unsafe. Other browsers joined in. Let's Encrypt gained popularity. And everything on the web was now on HTTPS. API calls between HTTP based services were also moved over to HTTPS. Granted, most

The Culture of the Public Postmortem

Open source software (OSS) runs a big part of the world. It handles all kinds of loads from small to unimaginably huge. This tiny blog you are reading is built on OSS. The mighty Instagram is (or was?) built on OSS. But this software is hardly perfect. It fails, and

Do One Thing and Do it Well

For as along as I can remember, I have been using Unix-like systems; Linux in particular. In fact, I only encountered Windows when I got to UCT in 2009. It served me well because I was able to do everything I needed to do and more. But I always found

The Art of Code Reviews

Ahhh, good ol' code reviews. Or Pull Requests (PRs) if you prefer. If you search Google for 'code reviews' you will probably find over a million articles on them. I want to add one more onto that million 🙃

Writing Web API Clients

I think I have used APIs long enough to have opinions on how API clients should be written. Specifically, web API clients. I will share those opinions here. Honestly, I think they should be absolute law 🙃

The Importance of Frameworks

The Importance of Frameworks

I have been reluctant to publish this one. Mostly because I know it rubs some people the wrong way and it incites debate. But here goes...

Since the Last Post: Context is Key

In the previous platform update I added subscriptions. All a user would get as feedback for subscribing was an alert above the form confirming they were subscribed. Notice that I said “was”. That's because this has changed and in this post I will talk about how. This post

My Journey As a Software Engineer

My Journey As a Software Engineer

This is my story so far. I hope it is just the beginning

platform-updates

Since the Last Post

When this platform launched it was just a few Django text fields and nothing more. It is still early days but there has been some changes since then... I have added an estimated read time. As a person who does a lot of reading on the internet I know how

The Technology Vortex

The Technology Vortex

Do things that don't scale. Keep it simple and let demand grow your need for scale