This is the first time I am writing a recap of a year after getting inspired by some amazing recaps. This post is a look back on all the professional things I did this year and a hint to what’s coming in 2020. Last year I did 5 most popular posts on my blog, this year is a look back at 2019. Let’s jump to the highlights:

Have you ever faced a call to completely redesign your code in one of your pull requests? I have and then thought what are the ways to avoid this. Call it a pull request or merge request, basically, it is a set of changes you want to go ahead and merge to the main branch to deploy to production and complete your task. This post is going to highlight a semi silver bullet to get your pull requests merged faster :), carry on reading.

If you have worked with software systems long enough you have surely worked with crons. Cron is a time-based task scheduler in UNIX-like operating systems. We use to run some task/script periodically, for example, every day at 9:30 AM.

Setting up and running crons has changed in the past years from a crontab command to now running it as a Kubernetes Cron Job, still, the basics remain the same and it is very important to monitor cron jobs. You don't want to wake up to some client not being paid because the CronJob did not run.

This post is going to highlight one efficient bash trick which simplifies cron job monitoring. The solution is language and framework agnostic as it is done in the command itself. Let's dive deeper into this way to effectively monitor cron jobs. Learn how to monitor cron jobs the easy way.

Docker has sharply risen in popularity in the past years. It has been one of the tools that have changed the way we work as software engineers and DevOps Engineers. From Docker v 17.05 multi-stage build was introduced which helped abandon the older builder pattern with the use of stages and target.

This post discussed how you can exploit docker multi-stage build to build optimal images suited for dev/test and production with a NodeJs example application. They are some compelling reasons to use docker on a dev environment too.

Google Cloud Run makes deploying serverless containers a breeze. It has a fully managed serverless version, which gives software scalability, high availability, and cost based on precise usage. Being serverless, there are no servers for you to manage. In addition to these awesome reasons, this post discusses 5 more compelling reasons to use serverless containers on Google Cloud Run for your next project.