Silverfin Engineering

I'm telling you it's that flaky spec again!

We sometimes rush to put labels on stuff. Are a couple of retries enough to characterize an E2E spec flaky??? Shame on you..! Case study Let's try to break an E2E spec run down to its atoms. Its (over simplified) core components for our study are the following. 1. A

7 ways to improve your next support rotation with event storage

In every software company, part of engineering responsibilities is to help the Support Team resolve customer issues and maintain the stability of the application by responding to errors and alerts. In this article, I want to briefly describe the benefits for engineers working on support issues of having an application

Silverfin Takeaways, KubeCon Valencia 🍊

Leading cloud native pioneers and open-source community members gathered in beautiful and warm Valencia. The last time Silverfin Cloud Infrastructure engineers were able to join KubeCon was pre-corona (Barcelona, 2019), so it felt good to be back. We met many great people, saw many exciting projects, and networked with our

Provisioning compute instances with Chef from Terraform

The problem When Terraform 0.13.4 [https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-hashicorp-terraform-0-15-general-availability] was released, various provisioners, including the Chef provisioner, were deprecated [https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/notice-terraform-to-begin-deprecation-of-vendor-tool-specific-provisioners-starting-in-terraform-0-13-4/13997] with no replacement. They were later removed in Terraform 0.15 [https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-hashicorp-terraform-0-15-general-availa

PostgreSQL zero-downtime migration of a primary key from int to bigint (with Ruby on Rails specific notes)

“90% what?” “I said this table is at 90%.” “Of what?” “Of int values for its primary key.” “That .. doesn’t sound good.” “No, if it gets to 100% we’re down.” “That’s not good.” “No, captain obvious.” “So what do we do?” “We have to migrate it to

Get to know Youp, our Talent Acquisition Specialist

When you apply for an engineering job at Silverfin, the first person to contact you will be Youp, our Talent Acquisition Specialist. He’ll assist you throughout the whole recruiting process: smoothly organising the interviews and meetings and making sure you’re well informed of the process and what’ll

Always set explicit timeouts

Our next ticket is to implement another integration with 3rd party HTTP API. As it's in life, the documentation is imprecise, provided examples are outdated, and nobody is responding to our e-mails. It's not the first one though, so after some time we do have it ready. Either it is

Mob Debugging

Here at Silverfin, we encourage pair programming for knowledge sharing, instant code reviews, and overall better code quality. There have been occasions of mob programming [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming] as well when we got together on-site or during a retreat. Mob programming is like pair programming, but

remote work

How to work remotely when you don’t want to

Sometimes circumstances force us to work remotely. Here are a few tips and tricks that have been battle tested by our teams, that could hopefully help you in the remote adventure.