Author: Alexander Sirotin

Principal Software Engineer and an industry leader with startup and FAANG experience. I specialize in storage, distributed systems, and data protection services. I also blog on software engineering methods, code quality, cloud computing and other related topics.

Is it really a Singleton?

2021-02-02 Development Tips & Tricks
Recently, I have investigated a defect that is interesting to share. As part of our operations, we need to be able to run tools, which will invoke APIs on different AWS services. For example, one common tool is to run a certain CloudWatch query and analyze the results. The framework,…

The Mossad Challenge 2018 – Entry Riddle

2018-04-20 Cyber Security
For the Israeli independence day, the Mossad published a new challenge. When I have some free time I try to crack it and enjoy learning new stuff in the process 🙂 Let’s start? If we’ll go the the Mossad webpage, we’ll see the following picture: As you can see, there…

Marking field as required when using Lombok Builder

2018-03-28 Development Tips & Tricks
The builder pattern is nice and useful, and using Lombok @Builder annotation instead of implementing it each time can save a lot of time. However, there is one problem with this. You can’t really define a required field. For example, Let’s assume we have this class: 123456@Value @Builder public class…

Simple item versioning with DynamoDB

2018-03-26 Development
Occasionally you want to store information in a database with keeping versioning, so you will be able to retrieve previous versions of the record. In this example, we will use AWS DynamoDB and take advantage of some of its features. For the example, lets take a simple record that contains…

Life got much easier – Using Lombok with Java

2018-03-12 Development Tips & Tricks
After more than 5 years programming in C++, recently I’ve started my first steps programming in Java. There are many differences and I’ll try to share some tips that will make your lives better 🙂 First one is Project Lombok. From their documentation: Project Lombok is a java library that…

How to consume all messages from an SQS queue ?

2018-01-14 Tips & Tricks
My goal was finding an AWS service that will answer the following requirements: Store large amounts of data (split into small chunks) reliably. Accessible from multiple zones/regions. Low read/write latencies. Cheap enough. SQS is a powerful service that is really useful for de-coupling between micro-services and allowing reliable transfer of…

SQS Benchmark (with large messages)

2017-07-27 Development
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a scalable and fully managed message queuing service that allows users to transmit any amount of data through the web without administrative responsibility. Recently, I tried to evaluate whenever the SQS service will fit my needs for a design I’m working on. My…

Serverless On-call duty notifier – Part 2

2017-07-24 Development
In the previous blog post, I’ve described how to build a simple SMS notification system using DynamoDB, SNS and AWS Lambda. In this post, I’ll show how to change it in order to allow each user to choose whenever he wants to get SMS notification, Email notification or nothing at…

Serverless On-call duty notifier – Part 1

2017-06-28 Development
As many engineers in the industry, we have on-call duty. The on-call duty is defined at the beginning of each month and the list of the on-call engineers for each date can be found in an excel sheet. Well, this is nice but I want to get notified when I’m…

Getting the right Jenkins build number using Python

2017-06-27 Tips & Tricks
One of the jobs in our CI pipeline is responsible for compiling, building and packing the code. The artifacts of the job is a directory on our storage with the build number and all the artifacts that are related to this build number. For example: //storage/build_1000, //storage/build_1001 and etc. There…