My dog is not really a superhero ;) Still, the title is catchy and Generative AI can make it look like one: What’s even cooler is that we can create multiple variants around this theme quite easily: These images are all originating from single photo of my french bulldog but were processed using generative AI model (to be technically correct it’s a pipeline and not just one model) called Stable Diffusion XL, done using technique called inpainting, which in a nutshell fills the gaps in the image using user supplied mask.

The common wisdom says: “Do not implement password storage on your own” … Considering amount of things that can be done wrong, perhaps relying on one of plenty of external providers is the right thing to do :) If you still want to do this, read OWASP Password Storage Cheat Sheet as a first step. After that, read OWASP Authentication Cheat Sheet - password storage and authentication are close layers and most likely you’ll be working on both.

If you are backend engineer, you probably treat nonfunctional requirements like security, availability, scalability etc. just as if they were laws of physics. And that’s good when working on mature, mission critical systems. But what if you don’t need all that and want to simply focus on getting something simple but professionally looking out there? Something like MVP/early stage product? Do you really need microservices, containers, service discovery, load balancers, caches, multiple databases, all clustered and replicated accross multiple availability zones?

Quite a chunk of time has passed since my last update to this blog. While primary reason is my super busy life (on both proffessional and personal fronts) there was also another one I have finally addressed, along with a few extras. The reason was that over the years I simply grew tired of WordPress software. The point to migrate away from it occupied my TODO list for too long. I am not going to bash WP here, I used it for many years, and for that I am grateful to its authors.

I guess it’s time to sum up recent trends in how we build, deploy, and operate complex server side software. Virtualization and cloud computing have been with us for quite a while but right now the era of containers is coming, with entire Docker ecosystem paving the way. You might want to ask a very valid question: “What’s in it for me?” :) I will focus on business implications of the technology.

A little story today. It goes like this. I drop by one of our teams, and within completely different discussion I get asked this very “simple” question: “Can we overlay an actual development team cost on top of product revenues so that we know if we are in the red or in the green?” If you haven’t noticed yet, there’s a flaw in this question. The problem is, it simply doesn’t make sense from economic point of view.