Building a data synchronization service is easy until things break. It's easy to move files from Point A to Point B, but it's incredibly hard to guarantee that Point B is a perfect mirror of Point A — especially when networks fail, data arrives out of order, or sources go silent …

When your team uses merge commits instead of rebasing, git log can deceive you. That flat, linear list of commits doesn't tell the whole story — and if you're trying to figure out what's actually in a release, you might draw the wrong conclusions. Here's a scenario I ran into recently …

When working with Django's multi-database support, there's a subtle issue that can trip you up: QuerySets remember which database they're bound to, and this can lead to unexpected conflicts. The Setup In our codebase (Prancer), we have custom managers that use using(self.db) to bind a QuerySet to a …

When integration-testing code that calls AWS Lambda, you don't always want to hit the real thing. LocalStack gives you a local, containerized version of AWS services — including Lambda — that you can spin up, use, and tear down as part of your test suite. Here's a pattern I've been using: create …