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Excluding Files from a List in Terraform

Saturday, Oct 10, 2020

Since the introduction of the for_each feature in Terraform 0.12 it is now possible to code powerful constructs to express the logic of your infrastructure. But sometimes you have to use some creativity to use this feature. I recently had to write a Terraform code that could upload all the JavaScript files from a local folder into a storage blob in Azure. But one of these files would have some template expressions so I wanted to upload all the files from the local folder except that one — because I would upload it individually.

Ricardo Ferreira

2 minute read

Troubleshooting 101

Friday, Jul 31, 2020

Part of my job as Developer Advocate is to reach out to developers in social forums like Stackoverflow, Reddit, and Slack communities to check whether I can provide help. While I feel great pleasure in doing this, it is getting harder and harder to help people these days.

I have the feeling that developers these days don’t know (or perhaps forgot or pretend that they forgot) how to perform basic troubleshooting. Every time I see a request for help in a forum usually people barely explain what the problem is, how it occurs, give evidence of what happened before the incident and, more importantly, to provide a minimal explanation of their environment.

Ricardo Ferreira

6 minute read

Data Sharing between Java & Go using Kafka and Protobuf

Thursday, Jul 9, 2020

One of the most incredible things in Apache Kafka is that record values are shapeless, meaning that developers can write any set of bytes they want, and it works just fine. This can be pretty powerful if they share data among different programming languages.

However, this characteristic is sometimes inadequate. It creates coupling problems as producers and consumers need to negotiate a common format that they can rely on to write and read data. Therefore, it is essential to use a neutral format – likely something accepted within the industry, such as Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schemas. This post will focus on the problems raised by using Protobuf to share data between Java and Go.

Ricardo Ferreira

3 minute read

Why the property 'auto.create.topics.enable' is disabled in Confluent Cloud?

Tuesday, Mar 17, 2020

If you ever used Apache Kafka you may know that in the broker configuration file there is a property named auto.create.topics.enable that allows topics to be automatically created when producers try to write data into it. That means that if a producer tries to write an record to a topic named customers and that topic doesn’t exist yet – it will be automatically created to allow the writing. Instead of returning an error to the client.

Ricardo Ferreira

4 minute read