Let’s assume that your system consists of a few microservices. Everything must have high availability so each microservice has at least two active instances on separate machines and everything must be multiplied by the number of testing and production related environments. When there is a situation that requires log analysis you have to skip from server to server looking for the file with desired information. You browse each file using some kind of notepad-based editor and if the files weight hundreds of megabytes it’s quite a challenge. ... Read More

Over a year ago I heard for the first time about the ELK stack. Since then I’ve had an opportunity to help five teams to implements ELK as a part of their development process (one team is using it on production, the rest of them so far only in development environment). ELK stands for ElasticSearch-Logstash-Kibana and it’s a set of services that helps to improve productivity in the area of logging, covering aspects of collecting, processing, storing and presenting log data. ... Read More

My laptop stores everything on 250 GB SSD hard drive (actually Windows sees it as 223 GB), so from time to time I’m running out of free space. When there is a need I’m starting clearing-up by emptying c:\Users\user_name\AppData\Local\Temp\ and c:\Users\user_name\Downloads\ directories (the second one against all appearances is often full of unnecessary files). When this is not enough I use WinDirStart to analyze my hard disk usage. This simple but extremely useful tool presents directory tree with attributes related to disk utilization such as: size, usage percentage, number of items (files and subdirectories), etc. ... Read More

The challenge 🔗︎ Recently I’ve had occasion to work much more than usually with NHibernate. This is a really great ORM and a very mature project, but when you make a mistake it informs you about that in a very generic way (in most cases). The problem that hunted me for a few days was the issue with field length constrains (which was caused by insufficient and inconsistent REST API validation). ... Read More

A few weeks ago I posted about negative aspects of applying AutoMapper. As an alternative I suggested typing all mapping code by hand or utilize some kind of generator like T4Scaffoling or something Roslyn based. In the past I experimented with T4Scaffoling but it was quite tedious. It requires preparation of templates in T4 syntax, referencing it to the project and writing some PowerShell code to provide data for templates. There also was an issue with assembly locking. ... Read More