Recent content on Antonio Martinović blog
It’s not often that I come across a book that answers such a number of questions in a way that truly resonates with me as with this book. While reading through The Righteous Mind, I’ve often found myself stopping to think about what I’ve just read and how that can be applied to myself personally and how it enriches my understanding of the world and the people in it. As I grow older, I’ve changed…
Software engineering interviews are like putting together IKEA furniture, a little bit of it is fun and interesting, but it gets dull quickly if you have to put together an entire office worth, and there are always a few extra bits at the end that you are unsure about because you haven’t read the manual, also, your opinion of the candidate feels complete, but if pressed on it more often than not…
Few times already I’ve had discussions with people about video games and what kind of benefits can we derive from them outside of just fun and relaxation. Usually I get flashbacks to childhood arguments with my parents excusing my late night gaming sessions and repeating myself plenty how it’s improving my hand eye coordination, teaching me about other cultures and how there are pro players…
At a point in my past I’ve found myself working in a somewhat successful startup, it seemed successful because we were hiring more and more engineers and the scope of work and number of teams kept steadily increasing. Somewhere in the middle I realised our engineering staff needed a set of engineering principles and a progression framework that would act as a north star for my fellow team members…
If you are in the top end of seniority in your team or company, either in technical or domain areas, chances are you will quickly understand the issue or a new feature your team is presented with and you’ll also have a decent clue on how to approach it thanks to your technical knowledge of the system and familiarity of the product. This is great and extremely valuable to the organisation, but…
Few weeks ago I had an idea for an app, so naturally I started searching for a similar one on Google and I didn’t find anything, I even spoke with some of my friends about it and they didn’t mention anything that they were aware of anything similar, so I got excited and started planning my efforts in developing it, I even took a week of vacation from work to focus on that. The idea was a time…
I quite liked to book, it has a lot of interesting facts that I didn’t know about, but it also had a lot of facts I already did know about especially computing related. I’m not feeling particularly smug about that because those that I did know I learned mostly from YouTube videos and some of those were by Matt Parker anyway. As Matt argues in the later parts of the book, humans are really good…
The third week picked up the pace a bit, the challenge was balancing it with other things in my life, as I’ve recently also picked up running. There were a few things I found myself doing that made it easier though. Knowing what will be the first thing for tomorrow This has worked nicely for me in the past as well, and it’s where I will deliberately leave something unfinished, so that…
The second week started of slow with some very small commits, it was about fixing up the Zitadel demo I started, which, to be honest, was only broken because I didn’t read the documentation properly. Ahh yes, the famous dilemma, should I spend 3 hours with try different random things or should I spend 30 minutes reading the docs? I think we all know the answer to that one. RTFM, but hey, at…
The problem Ever since my role changed from a software engineer to a engineering manager, I’ve been coding far less, my contributions were mostly in the form of code reviews and the occasional bug fix, and this has fueled a feeling of longing to actually write code again, to be able to create something from scratch. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’ve decided to try…
The biggest challenge with new leaders is letting go If you are in the top end of seniority in your team or company, either in technical or domain aspects, chances are you will quickly understand the issue or a new feature your team is presented with and you’ll also have a good clue on how to approach it due to your technical knowledge or familiarity of the product and the system. This is great…
I’ve always found the job description of a staff engineer to be a particularly compelling one, it requires a lot of technical, product and organisational knowledge, but it also needs a set of hard and soft skills to actually utilise this knowledge, without all of these combined the effect that can be achieved in an organisation is only but a fraction of what is possible. Quite a challenging set of…
There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers Above is something I always repeat when someone starts a question with “This is probably a dumb question, but…”. The thought process behind it makes total sense: either a person doesn’t want to waste the time of other people on the team or doesn’t want to look silly, so they start with a nice cushion to fall back on in…
5 years ago when I finished university I was learning something new every day, I was a software engineer and there was, what seemed to be an ocean of new shiny technology I wanted to learn about, things that make the application run faster, or UI look nicer, things that make the developer experience better. I moved from one company to another always jumping into a more interesting project, always…
Improvement day(s) is an event in which each team member is given a chance to use the day(s) in whichever way they want, well as long as it’s something productive, where are not here for improving Tekken or Rocket League skills on the PlayStation. What we are about here is different things like learning something new, trying out a new library or tool and even hacking out a tiny proof of concept.…
I think that we all want to be good people who try to be nice and help others even though the today’s world makes it seem like this is not the case. I try to make others’ lives easier by being respectful of their time and not asking for much of their attention because I know they are busy people with a bunch of stuff on their minds. But then I’ve found myself asking, why am I so often not…
This is going to be a short one I’m only writing this one because I could not Google exactly what I needed as easily as I expected, so hopefully it might help someone. Setting up an Elasticsearch instance to test against on CircleCI is actually quite straightforward. Your .circleci/config.yml should look something like this: jobs : build : docker : - image : circleci/<language>:<version TAG>…
History tables hold the past state of an entity by saving all the values of the original entity along with a date and time range field that specify when these values were valid, I will refer to this field as “validity” . This pattern is used when you need to remember the changes an entity went through over time, it is often used with, for example, pricing data, so that you can track…
Git is an incredibly useful tool for a programmer, you use it to version the work you do and distribute it easily on other computers. But over the years, I’ve found that a lot of my workflow depends on various configurations and helper scripts I have in my path. So why not version those as well, it does allow you to get started in seconds in a very familiar environment on every new computer…
We developers love to solve problems, it is probably the largest source of dopamine we can get at work so we seek it like an addict. These problems we find can be both technical and product related, it doesn’t matter as long as there is something we can throw the energy at, get in the flow and after one too many cups of coffee have the privilege of exclaiming “Eureka” to the team like some modern…
KDE Connect useful commands So I’ve been using KDE Connect Android application for a while now due to its great integration KDE Plasma desktop. It allows you to send files over, share your clipboard, sync notifications and has other useful features like remote control using the phones screen as a touchpad or keyboard on your computer which is greatly appreciated feature for when you just…
Well, hello there Welcome to my blog, this is going to be a place for me to share what and how I use in my work and at home. Stuff like mini tutorials, random rants and TILs of programming. Stay tuned!