The problem: The laptop display brightness fluctuates after booting when running on battery power.

The Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991, but Russian language remained the region's lingua franca for decades. Many children of my generation were simultaneous bilinguals; we spoke both Azeri and Russian since childhood. I learned to type in Russian, but I never ever learned the official Windows Russian keyboard layout, because I didn't have a keyboard with Russian alphabet printed on it. The alternative was a phonetic layout, and I still remember a program called "Alt-Win", which allowed to select Azeri Latin, or Russian phonetic keyboard layouts in Windows 9x. Over the years, I used other tools in Windows XP and Windows 7 to recreate this layout. And then I moved to Linux.

In Linux, the only tool you need to create your own keyboard layout is a text editor. Would you like to find out how?

As I am writing this text, enjoying Finnish summer from an armchair in my backyard, a feeling of satisfaction fills me. After nine years with a home desktop machine, I'm finally back to using a personal laptop. I can once again work on my projects from anywhere - from a sofa in the living room or an airplane 10 km above the ground. "Good for you, Zaur, you've got a laptop, why are you so excited?" Let's go back a few years ago. It all began with a loud rant...

It's pretty straightforward to unit test the components of an application that follows Hexagonal Architecture. The components are part of specific layers, and mocking the next dependency layer is usually simple. However, this approach means we never test the application as a whole and have to rely on expensive integration or end-to-end tests to do so.

We can test the application components in sociable manner, leaving our components' direct dependencies as-is, and pushing the mocks further to the application edges.

If we push the mocks too far, we end up with lightweight integration tests. Let's explore how we can utilise such tests in a context of Django application and what benefits we can reap.

It's hard to sell a software product - whether it's a library, a program, or generally speaking, a system - if it doesn't come with a top-notch manual. And keeping such manual up-to-date is not easy too. Gojko Adzic's ideas of Living Documentation to the rescue, but unfortunately they are still far from being widely adopted.

In this post I propose a different way of making Living Documentation - by testifying its contents. Dive in to find out how!

Turkish Airlines is our first choice when it comes to flying to Azerbaijan from Finland. It’s not the cheapest, but the service is great. You get good food even in economy class, and there is an entertainment system with a broad selection of movies to keep you and the kids busy. The baggage allowance is huge - 30kg for check-in and the standard 8+kg for carry-on, although I’ve never seen them put the carry-on baggage on scales.

So, what’s all the fuss about?

While configuring a continuous delivery pipeline for this blog, I encountered unexpected permission denials from GitHub. Was there something wrong with the setup?

"Big Bang" software releases are hard on end users and developers. What can we do about it?

Welcome to the third part of the article series, which cover principles of Hexagonal architecture, Dependency Injection, Domain-Driven Design and applies these all to Python and Django application design.

Welcome to the second part of the article series, which cover principles of Hexagonal architecture, Dependency Injection, Domain-Driven Design and applies these all to Python and Django application design.