Homebrew logo - a pint glass filled with frothy beer with an Apple in it at the mouth of the glass

What is Homebrew? How is it useful?

What is Homebrew? Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS and Linux systems. Although it is called homebrew, the command is shortened to brew. The thing about homebrew is that every command and option sticks to the theme of brewing. I haven’t gone and dug out why this is the case, but I found it amusing. As I had used homebrew a couple of times when setting up my work laptop and now setting up my own, I got curious and wanted to know what options the command accepted....

December 25, 2022 · 5 min · 897 words
Image of a MacBook Pro with XCode running and debugging an application.

Setting up your Macbook Pro as a developer

Background So you got your brand new MacBook Pro. And now you are dreading the time you are going to spend setting it all up. I was. It is a time sink. So I made a little guide that is selfishly for myself in the future if I were to format this one or buy another one. Someday I’ll script it all as a brew bundle and just install it....

December 25, 2022 · 5 min · 1002 words
System Design

What is a System Design Interview

Most good organisations expect their engineering hires to have gone through a system design interview. For a vast majority of people this might sound like a weird thing to do as most people don’t individually design large scale systems. So expecting someone to design a highly scalable and available system in less than 60 minutes is a daunting task. We must also consider the fact that not everyone gets to work in organisations that build large scale distributed systems....

October 16, 2022 · 7 min · 1427 words
Azure Active Directory

Azure Active Directory for Developers: What you need to know

This is a long read and I spent a pretty long time going through videos and articles compiling this into one post. Not something I would have done usually. But I do think that sometimes having it all in one place is easier to access than splitting into multiple articles. I hope the TOC helps group things. Azure AD is Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. Lots of words. But do they make sense?...

October 23, 2021 · 12 min · 2370 words
Open Json

OPENJSON - The Utility function you did not know you needed in a Data transfer Logic App

Background I have been using Logic Apps to transfer data from one database to another. Of course, there is business logic in the queries run on the source database. And in such a case, maybe Azure Data Factory might have been a better choice. It very well could be. But for now I have been using a logic app, that simply runs a pretty big query, fetches the results and inserts into my destination database after some checks on the data present in the destination database....

June 21, 2021 · 6 min · 1146 words