Programming

Recently, this question came up during the discussion. “How many source-code repositories should a startup have?” There are two extreme answers, a single monorepo for all the code or repository for each library/microservice. Uber, for example, had 8000 git repositories with only 200 engineers! I think both extremes are wrong. Too many repositories make it hard to find code and one single repository makes it harder to do simple things like testing , bisecting (to find buggy commit), deciding repository owners.

To use monorepo or not is an eternal debate. Each has its pros and cons. Let’s say you decide to go with monorepo, one major issue you will face over time is slow testing. Imagine a monorepo, consisting of an Android app, an iOS app, some backend code, some web frontend code. On only very few occasions will someone modify more than one of those simultaneously. Further, most of these projects confined to their directories would be using different build systems as well, for example, gradle for Android, yarn/npm for Javascript, go/rust/java/npm for the backend. The total build time and test time will only grow over time. It annoys developers making small modifications to their part of the codebase. And it slows down the development velocity drastically.

In 2020, the web is still the most accessible permission-less platform. For the past few months, I have been playing and building side projects to simplify my life. I started with a Calendar Bot for scheduling events, DeckSaver for downloading decks from Docsend, AutoSnoozer for email management, and StayInTouch for maintaining follow-ups. When I started on this journey, I had the following in my mind. Cost of domain ~ 12$ a year or 1$ a month Cost of a VM ~ 10$ a month

A basic webserver Docker containers are small OS images in themselves that one can deploy and run without worrying about dependencies or interoperability. All the dependencies are packed in the same container file. And the docker runtime takes care of the interoperability. You are not tied to using a single language or framework. You can write code in Python, Go, Java, Node.js, or any of your favorite languages and pack it in a container. Consider a simple example of a Go-based webserver

A single developer has to sometimes deal with 7 different consoles by the same company…

Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1 You opened AVD Manager in Android Studio and tried to start an AVD, you got “Emulator: Process finished with exit code 1”. Following are the steps to debug this Find out the name of the emulator. Click the down arrow 🔽 which is to the right of play arrow ▶️, to find out the name of the AVD. Let’s say the name is “Nexus_5X_API_28_x86”. ...

Die with me is a chat app which can be used only when the phone’s battery is below 5%. Here is a fun way to use the app without draining your phone’s battery. Connect the phone via ADB or start Android emulator and fake the battery level to 4%. Bash 1 2 sudo pip3 install adb-enhanced adbe battery level 4 # Set battery level to 4% And now, you can use the app. After playing with the app, reset the battery level with, ...

Sh 1 2 #!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail The first statement is a Mac, GNU/Linux, and BSD portable way of finding the location of the bash interpreter. The second statement combines ...

Update: As of April 2020, I have switched over to GitHub Actions . Travis CI has become buggy and flaky over time and I got tired of trying to keep the builds green. My GitHub action scripts can be seen here . Just like many software engineers, I maintain my config files for GNU/Linux and Mac OS in a git repository . Given that, I wrote a fair bit of them in interpreted code, notably, Bash, it is a bit hard to ensure that it is bug-free. The other problem I face is that packages on homebrew, the Mac OS package manager becomes obsolete and gets deleted from time to time. I added CI testing on Travis CI to prevent these breakages and to ensure that my dotfiles are always in good shape for installation. The great thing about Travis CI is that it is entirely free for open-source repositories even for testing on Mac OS containers.

Update: As of Mar 2022, I recommend everyone to use GitHub Actions I maintain a somewhat popular Android developer tool ( adb-enhanced ). The tool is written in Python, supporting both Python 2 and 3. Testing the tool requires both Python runtime as well a running Android emulator. I, initially, used Travis CI for setting up continuous testing of this tool. Later, I felt that Travis CI was too slow and when I came across Circle CI, I decided to give it a try. As of now, both Travis and Circle CI are used for testing. Here is what I learned from my experience.