Eakan Gopalakrishnan

In my career spanning financial market data platforms, telecom systems, insurance quoting systems and energy billing, I’ve come to appreciate that the craft of true software engineering isn’t about avoiding complexity, it is about choosing the right kind of complexity. In the world of event-driven architectures (EDA), when a microservice needs to change its state and notify the rest of the world of this event, it faces a fundamental engineering challenge, known as the Dual Write Problem. This is the Achilles’ heel of distributed systems: ensuring that a local database update and an external event publication are an atomic pair. This operation has to be atomic. The write-to-the-database and the event publication has to be either both successful or both fail. One cannot succeed on its own as it would break consistency. ...

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d hear of an agile management framework of this name - HoneyBadger. What is HoneyBadger? HoneyBadger is an agile management framework. Now that doesn’t make much sense does it? Don’t we already have plenty of agile management frameworks? Let’s start breaking that down a bit Info ...

In my earlier post, I shared how I clicked a button to migrate Azure CDN to Front Door and then started being charged a lot for hosting a simple blog on Azure. So I decided to end my relationship with Azure and move on to greener pastures with AWS. It was not too much work, so why not. I read about AWS Amplify and saw that it was the perfect solution to my problem. So off I went looking for resources to get onboard. ...

So I recently did something that I didn’t expect to have financial consequences. I switched from Azure CDN to Azure FrontDoor Standard. Sounds like a simple thing to do considering Microsoft was suggesting I do the move - move from one product to another. Unfortunately the implications were that I would now have to pay £34 per month to ensure my blog was running smooth! This is up nearly 33 times what it cost me before! And the warning didn’t actually tell me that there was a base price involved. ...

What’s the latest version as of writing this post With version 0.146.0, the Hugo template system was re-architected for very good reasons. This simplifies a lot of things for template lookups. However, there are breaking changes despite the best efforts of the authors. Not all websites and themes that use Hugo, keep up with the pace of Hugo’s development. Many of these projects are open source like Hugo, furthermore many of the maintainers have more than 1 job and aren’t paid to keep their source code up to date. ...

I was curious about the title - As your team gets bigger, your leadership style has to adapt. I am not Julie Zhuo, and I am not a Vice President of an organisation just yet. But as I started working at Kaluza, leading multiple teams, I felt like I had to evolve my leadership style accordingly too. The article was reassuring as I feel like I did get some things right. ...

I have been using Hugo-PaperMod as a theme for quite some time. It is pretty lightweight and yet flexible. For the past 4-5 years, I have been working with this Hugo based blog and I have definitely learned a lot about the structure of a Hugo website and made several modifications to the original theme but just on my blog and shared about it earlier. There was one thing that I hadn’t done for quite sometime. Primarily because I really don’t have the time to keep modifying themes. I barely have time to write about things I want to write. But today I bit the bullet and decided that I was going to do it. This is partly because my wife was reviewing the latest Resume page that I added and she told me that the navigation had to be scrolled horizontally! And as someone who has built user friendly platforms most of my professional career, this hurt. So off to work I went. ...

What is an internal developer platform? A suite of tools or applications, utilities or the likes that is tailored to the needs of developers of an organization that enables them to build, deploy and manage software in an opinionated way that is often considered as the golden path to building and releasing a product to customers. Companies generally invest in these as they start to scale. They tend to realize the benefits, which, I think, can be summarized as the following: ...

Starting a family Three years ago, my wife and I decided to think about starting a family. The decision to start a family was not made like let’s do it. It was more of a reluctant, if it happens, it happens. Fast-forward about 18–24 months, 2 miscarriages, and numerous emotional roller coasters and pain, both physical and psychological, especially for my wife as I feel like women go through a lot compared to men during pregnancy, we finally had our baby. ...

Do you ever feel like your network infrastructure is a black box? When I first dove into cloud networking, the term Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) sounded mysterious—like a secret compartment in the sky. Over the years, I’ve come to see a VPC as your custom sandbox inside a public cloud: a private playground built on shared real estate. In this post, we’ll unpack what a VPC really is, how it works under the hood, and why it’s an indispensable tool for any software craftsperson aiming for secure, scalable cloud architecture. ...