Mike Mwita

Forget Everything You Know About Time

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0300

M itch Hedberg had a bit about late-night television:

“I saw a commercial on late-night TV, it said, ‘Forget everything you know about slipcovers.’ So I did, and it was a load off my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell me slipcovers, but I didn’t know what the hell they were.”

So here is my pitch: forget everything you know about time.

I mean it. Put the intuition down and step away from it. You learned clocks and calendars before you could read, you have used them every single day since, and that fluency is precisely the problem — it is conversational fluency. It survives on ambiguity, because a human listener quietly patches the gaps for you. A computer will not. It takes your assumption, applies it with total consistency, and hands you back something wrong in a way you never thought to check.

Bug #1 — The Clock That Kept Slipping

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0300

I was integrating an external API. The datetime it stamped on every response never agreed with my local clock — and not by a clean, constant amount. Sometimes it was 4 minutes behind. Later, 8. Then more. The gap kept drifting.

 our clock their timestamp gap
 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
 10:14 10:10 −4 min
 11:02 10:54 −8 min
 13:40 13:29 −11 min
 ↑
 not a constant — it grows

The Wrong Theory

My first instinct was that we were sending the wrong value, so I checked the payload. The date was correct. That check cost me time: a timezone shift usually leaves the date component intact and only moves the clock, so a date-only comparison passes while the instant is wrong. The date only flips when the shift crosses midnight — which is why “the date is right” feels like evidence and isn’t.

Beyond Backend Basics

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:10:00 +0300

Beyond Backend Basics

Most backend developers can build APIs, wire up databases, and scale services. That’s good. But “good” is not enough if your ambition is to become the kind of engineer who can design distributed systems that survive chaos and influence organizations at scale.

It’s a checklist of some of the skills you need to learn now if you want to operate at the highest levels of engineering.

From Backend Comfort → Distributed Systems Reality

The leap from backend to distributed systems is not about syntax or frameworks. It’s about learning to think in terms of tradeoffs, failures, and coordination across unreliable networks.

Write Once, Test Everywhere: Sharing Common Tests in Python’s unittest

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 07:00:00 +0300

A while back, I was writing tests for a project using Python’s unittest. Nothing dramatic — just the usual rhythm: write a class, test it, move to the next one. After a few classes, though, the déjà vu hit.

Generating Go Code from OpenAPI Specification

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:00:00 +0300

A quick and practical walkthrough for developers who want to generate type-safe Go code directly from OpenAPI specs.

go-strict

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation

As Go codebases grow, complexity often hides in deeply nested logic rather than raw line count. Traditional linters catch syntax and style issues but rarely highlight mental load.

go-strict was built to quantify cognitive complexity so teams can reason about readability early—before code becomes difficult to maintain or review.

Results

The linter analyzes function control flow, nesting, and branching to produce a clear complexity score with file and line references. Output formats are configurable, making it easy to integrate into CI pipelines.

FinDocParserPro

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation

Financial systems often rely on documents like invoices and receipts that arrive in inconsistent formats and qualities. Many OCR solutions extract raw text but stop short of producing reliable, structured domain data that can be consumed by ERP or accounting systems.

FinDocParserPro was built to bridge this gap by combining OCR, deterministic extraction rules, and a clean, testable architecture that scales with complexity instead of collapsing under it.

Results

The project delivers a robust document ingestion pipeline with clear separation of concerns across Domain, Application, Infrastructure, and API layers. CQRS is implemented without heavyweight dependencies, ensuring clarity and performance.

go-bloomfilter

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation

Many backend systems need to answer one question extremely fast: have I seen this before? Traditional data structures often trade memory for speed, which becomes expensive at scale.

This project was created to explore probabilistic data structures in Go while gaining hands-on experience with bitwise operations, hashing strategies, and memory-efficient design.

Results

The implementation uses a compact []uint64 bit array with auto-tuned parameters to balance false positives and memory usage. Hashing is inspired by MurmurHash to ensure even distribution and consistent performance.

Africa's Talking Go SDK

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation

Africa’s Talking provides powerful communication and payment APIs, but Go developers lacked a cohesive, idiomatic SDK that reduced boilerplate and simplified integrations.

This project aimed to make building telecom-driven applications in Go as seamless as possible, from quick prototypes to production systems.

Results

The SDK offers clean abstractions for SMS, Voice, USSD, Airtime, and Payments with minimal setup. It follows Go conventions closely, enabling predictable usage and easy extensibility.

Autores de Hugo

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 01:15:52 +0100

temas

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:21:18 +0100

sintaxe

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 23:21:06 +0100

Códigos curtos

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 11:51:36 +0100

Behavior-Driven Development in Go

Tue, 12 May 2020 07:00:22 +0300

Testing is often seen as a technical safeguard — a way to ensure code correctness. But what if tests could do more than that? What if they could express intent, document behavior, and communicate meaning across developers, testers, and product owners alike?

Caching Is Easy. Invalidation Is Where Systems Falter.