A Technical I.T./DevOps Blog
Problem scenario
You have read about “branching by abstraction,” but you do not know what it means. You read that it is ideal when the coding you are doing cannot be done incrementally. How do you “branch by abstraction”?
Solution
It is a method of trunk-based development; instead of using a branch, you commit to the trunk (or main) branch of your repository.
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Continue reading “What Does “Branch by Abstraction” Entail?”
Problem scenario
You want to test your application. You are considering using mock/fake data. But you are concerned that the tests will be insufficient. Is it a best practice to test with production data?
Answer
It depends. We prefer the term “recommended practice” because of questions like these.
Some sources recommend using production data:
…many production issues are due the lack of real(istic) test data…
To ensure software of the highest quality possible,
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Continue reading “Is It a Recommended Practice to Use Production Data when Testing Software?”
Question
Which is a higher position, a Senior Engineer or a Staff Engineer?
Answer
Companies do not always conform to a job title convention or standard. However we find that the Staff Engineer title denotes a step above Senior. A Staff Engineer could be below a Principal Engineer however.
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Continue reading “Which Is a Higher Position, a Senior Engineer or a Staff Engineer?”
Question
What is long-tail latency or tail latency?
Answer
Tail latency is the worst performing time-measured response from an application. Outliers can be described as requests that take far longer than others in a statistical sample. Such irregular durations, with long latencies, are said to be at the tail-end of a chart or graph. Long-tail latency would generally refer to the worst 1% or worst 2% of the requests.
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Question
You have heard of projects and organizations in Azure DevOps. What is the difference between the two?
Answer
Organizations subsume projects. There can be 300 projects in an organization (according to this website).
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Continue reading “What is the Difference between an Organization and Project in Azure DevOps?”
Problem scenario
In logs in Azure DevOps or in Linux, you see “ENOENT” frequently. What does ENOENT mean?
Answer
It is a portmanteau of “Error No Entry”. Some directories are not accessible because of permissions issues or because they do not exist. Taken from https://newbedev.com/why-does-enoent-mean-no-such-file-or-directory.
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Question
You want definitions of some I.T. terms. In the context of application/system design, what are reliability, scalability and maintainability?
Answer
Reliability: Dependability or suitable for production; the property of performing consistently over time; worthy of being trusted at all times due to fault tolerance. A system that can perform despite hardware failures or regional data center failures is said to have reliability.
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Continue reading “What Are Reliability, Scalability and Maintainability?”
Question
What are different merging strategies in the context of Git?
Possible Answers
“…branches are completely useless unless you merge them…” – Linus Torvalds
A branch is a set of files associated with a code base usually in a collection known as a repository. Atlassian says “[b]ranching is a feature available in most modern version control systems…”,
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Continue reading “What is Knowledge of Merging Strategies in the Context of Git?”
Problem scenario
You run a website business. Where do you go to get an understanding about legal policies? You want to learn more about how to comply with Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing program’s policies. What do you do?
Solution
You can try termly.io for general policy information assistance. For Amazon’s Affiliate Marketing program specifically, see this external posting.
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Continue reading “Confused about Legal Policies for your Small Business?”
Problem scenario
You support an existing application and its servers. It is experiencing slowness as the users are complaining about its performance. What are some potential root causes of this slowness?
Possible Solutions
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Continue reading “What Can Cause an Application to Run Slowly?”