Code itself was rarely the problem, but what I clearly had no idea about is testing my code.

I slowly, painfully learned that the truly difficult part of coding is dealing with the thousands of ways things can go wrong with your application at any given time - most of them user related.

I love having tests. I hate writing them.

It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s hard, sometimes harder than writing the code. Worst of all, it doesn’t feel like it accomplishes anything.

When designing a new software project, one is often faced with a glut of choices about how to structure it. What should the core abstractions be? How should they interact with each other?

In this post, I want to argue for a design heuristic that I’ve found to be a useful guide to answering or influencing many of these questions:

Alpine Linux is a minimalist secure linux distro.

In security terms less “footprint” often means less vectors of attack and less complexity to analyze for vulnerabilities.

Alpine Linux is becoming a preferred base OS for many foundational official Docker Images (python, php, ruby, nginx, redis, haproxy, go) since downloading many large Docker Images (aka Deploying Docker Containers) can saturate the network at scale.

I haven’t used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even though my gmail account not only handles more email than I ever had on desktop clients, but also allows simultaneous access from multiple locations across the globe? Distributed systems have an unfair advantage, in that they can be robust against total disk failure in a way that desktop clients can’t, but none of the file corruption issues I’ve had have been from total disk failure. Why has my experience with desktop applications been so bad?

For an integer range :