Let me spend a quick couple of paragraphs on what happens behind the scenes when a large company deeply invests in a rebranding, and then, unexpectedly, is faced with a completely new reality. I thought it would be worth sharing. #BeOpen Over a year ago the process of a rebranded OLX for Europe started. To be honest, it was way overdue. Not only does the “old” OLX look dated, it also has a lot of design debt and inconsistencies across channels (desktop, PWA, native apps).

_TL;DR: I’m deprecating Zef.me but it’s somewhat stuck on Medium with annoying to migrate links. The 100x Engineer content may move here too in time. _ I know. I launched The 100x Engineer a while ago, and I’ve had Zef.me (previously under a different domain) for over 15 years. But actually, Zef’s Musings isn’t something new as people in OLX will know. I’ve been using a Facebook Workplace space with this name inside of OLX for a while as my place to brain dump work in progress ideas, as well as other stuff I’ve been up to.

Re:Invent happened two weeks ago, and usual there was a lot of good content there. One talk I would recommend to this audience is “Innovation at speed” by Adrian Crockford, which gives some insight into various aspects of cloud-enabled innovation, but also explains a bit how AWS is structured internally. However, the key message is about the Time to Value metric: How much time does it take to go from idea to value for customers?

You won’t believe what I learned I just reviewed over a hundred LinkedIN profiles (yes, we’re hiring at OLX — I reviewed Go developer profiles in this case). People love listicles (at least the non testy ones), so here’s one summing up my key take-aways from this experience. There’s just 4: People who write a “Summary” of themselves — you are a blessing. I care a lot about what drives you, what you’re looking for, etc.

Look ma, no wires! A little while ago the wires of my lightning earbuds started to crack, so I decided to take the plunge and buy myself some AirPods. That’s right, the EarPods without the wires. And I love them. Honestly, this is Apple at its best. They’re super easy to use (you can connect them to any Apple device by simply holding them next to them, and tapping a button).

The technologies I keep an eye on and find interesting evolve over time. I thought it could be interesting to share the things I’m currently seeing, thinking about, and playing with. The things on my technological radar, if you will. Here’s my list for this month. Previous editions can be found here. Kubernetes Not new by a long shot, but very much on my radar right now, as you will have guessed based on the past few days.

I’m always interested to read how Google implements things, both technical and non-technical. You can just be sure they don’t just do something because “that’s how have always been done” they rethink a lot of things, and like to back all their decisions with data. Recently I found an HBR article back from 2013 about how Google decided on having management and how to shape it: Here’s the most interesting (and applicable) part: According to Google, a good manager…

During my PhD I developed a deep appreciation of declarative programming. When I joined LogicBlox a few years back (two jobs ago, I’m not proud to say), I wrote an article about this: Declare Everything: At LogicBlox I also did a lot of DevOps related work in the context of the Nix project, where I worked with NixOS and NixOps. NixOps allowed you to define networks of machines and the software running on them by declaratively specifying what you wanted to run on them, rather than the steps to get the system there.

Over the past few days I’ve been reading up on, and experimenting with Kubernetes. If you’re also interested to see what the hype is all about (and so far I have to say — the hype is warranted, if you care about DevOps at all), here are the resources I used to get started. Install minikube Install minikube to start experimenting locally. This boots up a local VM (e.g. Virtualbox VM) with Kubernetes installed, and sets up the kubectl command to connect to it.

It’s happening Ever since Swift was open sourced by Apple including a release for Linux, people speculated about why Apple would do this. The most popular theory was that Apple itself wanted to use Swift on the server. And these days, even for Apple — server equals Linux — hence the Linux release. As far as we know, much of Apple’s server infrastructure (at least the stores) is build on WebObjects — a technology that is showing its age (to put it mildly).