November 2020 – Shekhar Gulati

On Mediocrity

In the last couple of years, one question that I have been often pondering is—

why it is difficult for senior leaders of an organization to work in unison and achieve great things together. While there are organizations that accomplish amazing things one after another, there are many others, where leaders cannot think beyond themselves and their self-interests.

The failure, in context of the blog, is not about an organization failing financially or collapsing in terms of business. An organization can be successful yet fail to achieve great things. This is a story that I have seen, read and observed, over the years. A new senior leader joins or an existing employee is promoted to a leadership role. They want to bring positive changes (at least they think that way) and become messiah for the organization. After a couple of years, there are only little achievements to be shown, nothing big and transformative that may have been realized or accomplished.

Using Testcontainters with Kotlin Spring Boot App

In this quick post I will show you how to use Testcontainers with Kotlin Spring Boot app. Testcontainers is a Java library that you can use to write integration tests that work with real third-party services like databases, message queues like Kafka, or any other service that can be packaged as a Docker container image.

Most developers use in-memory databases or fakes to test with external dependencies but to test against real stack you need to use real services. This week I faced as issue where one of my test was failing because a MySQL function was unavailable in H2. I was using in-memory H2 database in tests. My application used MySQL in the production mode. So, my valid MySQL query was not working when run in a test. This made me think of replacing H2 with MySQL database for tests.

I was aware of Testcontainers but had never used it in any application. So, this was the first time I used it. For most parts I liked it. I don’t have to work around limitations of H2 and I can hope I will not discover any issues because of difference between H2 and MySQL. Testcontainers is not perfect. It makes test slow. My build time has increased from 6 mins to 9 mins just because of Testcontainers. I am relying more on my CI server to run the complete test suite.

Testcontainers can do much more than running databases. You can use Testcontainers for:

Stream processing solutions like Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar
AWS Localstack
Selenium tests
Chaos tests

My Thoughts On Monorepo

A monorepo is a software development strategy where a single version control repository has source code for multiple projects, libraries, and applications irrespective of their programming language. Also, the organizations using Monorepo strategy often use a common build tool (like Bazel, Pants, Buck) to manage all the source code. Some of the popular examples of organizations that employ monorepo strategy are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Uber.

Before we start let me give some context on my background so that you can better understand my thoughts on Monorepo.

I head technology at an IT services organization. Most of the products that I build are using Microservices architecture, have multiple frontends(web and mobile). The biggest product that I recently built had close to 30 microservices, 1 web client written in React, and native mobile app built using React Native. These numbers are nowhere near the numbers big product companies have shared.

I prefer Macroservices over Microservices. I think most products don’t need more than 10 microservices.