Presentation recommendation - LinkedIn's Active/Active Evolution

I like to watch a IT related presentations. Those give you a lazy way of grasping the idea of "what's up" in particular subject. It's grasping because by watching you won't learn actual skills, but you will know what exists, where are the dragons hidden and where to look deeper. What's more, if you are bored, you can always skip some parts or go to next presentation - which is extremely important in our fast-paced business. And most importantly - always learn from the bests.

Today I recommend you following presentation: LinkedIn's Active/Active Evolution - Erran Berger
Why? Active/active architecture is probably one of the most popular solutions for scaling existing monolith. Check out where you can expect problems and how LinkedIn team solved them.

Cassandra - problems, issues, worries

Normally I "live" in .NET environment. That is, my work is usually related to .NET environment and most popular libraries associated with it. Some time ago, I started to work with Cassandra. Google it. Popular. Superb. Advanced. Supreme. Design for speed and resilience. Used by some big players. That sort of impression you will get. Therefore, just few days after meeting Cassandra I've had an eye opener. From my perspective, when I switched from .NET and start to develop solution based on Cassandra, it hit me. Cassandra is very rare specie. Developers who knows it - are more like extinct developers. Therefore online materials or help which you can get is way more limited than it is for .NET.

The most popular website for asking for help or advice is StackOverflow, for programmers. Just to give you a feeling, how .NET tag is more popular than Cassandra tag look at this:

What does it mean?

Back then when I was learning about Cassandra I've read every question tagged with Cassandra tag. I've even been able to answer some of them - it was much easier for me, as a beginner in Cassandra than to answer questions about .NET - where my knowledge and experience is way more broad. This is mostly because for answering .NET question you have around one minute, before somebody else's answer pops up, while for Cassandra question you have around one day or sometimes even more.

That also means when you have a problem - either with the client or Cassandra node itself - it may be hard to find help. Consider my question on StackOverflow: Cassandra routing key not set due to ArgumentException: Column column_aliases not found

This time I was lucky. I've received an answer quickly and the problem was easily fixable. However, the question was viewed only 73 times during 3 months!

Unfortunately, I have other example, which I will describe some other time... Stay tuned.

Use "Lato Font" in Google Blogger

As you can see in Google Blog Designer, there is no Font Lato to choose:

Happily, you can edit Template HTML and apply that font manually.

• Go to Draft Blogger -> Template -> Edit HTML
• Locate </head> closing tag
• Before that line, add line:
• <link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
• Locate tag <b:skin> and <b:skin> tag. Replace every occurrence of "Arial, " with "Lato, Arial, "

That's pretty much it. However, I noticed that the post became a little less readable than it was before (but it looks a lot more Flat/Material/Cool/Cutting-Edge though). To fix that, I've increased the font size for posts just by one pixel.

• Locate element <Group description="Post Background" selector=".post"> and add following element as a child (change according to the rest of your font rules):
• <Variable name="post.body.font" description="Font" type="font" default="normal normal 14px Lato, Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" value="normal normal 14px Lato, Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif"/>
• Find .post-body CSS selector and add property font: $(post.body.font);

That's all. Unfortunately, you still won't be able to see font Lato in Google Blog Designer, however the font should be applied on your blog.

Is it the right way of adding custom font to Google Blogger?

After writing my first post ever it made me think... It is really the right way of adding Font Lato or any custom font to Google Blogger? After googling it turns out.. YES! It is: Upload And Use Custom Fonts In-Blogger

PS. After all, I've decided to go with font Roboto, as on My Account Google Page and adjust the style of the blog to mimic that minimalistic design. Hope you like it.

This is it, here I write

I've planned to start blogging for a quite long time. Now, after seeing Microsoft Live Writer going Open Source I've decided to start blogging. Just now. Just like that. Therefore here is my first post ever. I'm planning to publish minimum 1 post per month. Let's see how that will work.