We started a new project and I was responsible for setting up the base project template. I hadto set up the dependency management in Gradle for easy upgrades and the packages structure.For tests, I had to come up with an easy way to decide how to split them. Services that connect tothe database had to be tested in integration (using slice tests for better performance) and therest in unit tests.Responsible for everything related to our external libraries from keeping up with the latestchanges and the breaking changes to upgrading all of our internal libraries and microservices.The latest major upgrade effort being Spring Boot 2.3 which greatly reduced our storage costs byimproving the way we build our Docker images leveraging the new layers feature.Added a smart mechanism in API Gateway for smooth GrahpQL schema upgrades. When aKubernetes pod has a new version it sends an event to API Gateway and when all pods have thenew versions the GraphQL schema is upgraded to that version. Also added a fail-safe mechanismbased on polling in case an event fails to arrive or cannot be processed.Implemented custom support for GraphQL Subscriptions (WebSockets) by having only oneconnection between the client and API Gateway. Also, only one Redis connection is used betweenAPI Gateway and every microservice’s pod.Got my second mentee and helped him migrate from testing to development being the first onefrom the company to make the transition. I kept the formula from my first mentee and it workedwonders. And from development he was later promoted to Team Lead.

Helped our testers reduce their workload by advocating that developers should invest more intotesting and should start to write more unit and integration tests instead of relying on slow E2Etests. As a result, this improved our team’s mood and we noticed that testers were less stressedbefore releases because our confidence in tests grew.Was responsible for security practices inside the team, mostly validating user access toresources. Also worked with the security lead to monitor the top OWASP vulnerabilities.Had my first mentee and under my guidance, she managed to level up with no struggles. The formula was to give her tasks that were gradual in difficulty and mix them with technical readingon the side.