Bitcoin can be forked. It’s almost a magical process, doing a fork. Money, raining from the skies. You will realize how magical it seems, once you try to explain how the fork works to someone not familiar with cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general.

What do you mean? You have some bitcoin, and then suddenly you have also some other coin? So the original bitcoin is split in two? Does Bitcoin lose half of it’s value then? But how can you just create new money? Who is paying for that?

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When you have a microservice architecture, you have to deal with failures on many different levels. One of the patterns commonly used to deal with failures of remote calls is the circuit breaker. It helps preventing cascading failures, when a problem in one services causes exhaustion of resources in other services. Let’s take a look at one example, how one might go about implementing this pattern in a Node.js microservice.

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When we talk about complex systems, one of the studied properties is often the resilience of the system. By resilience we mean the capacity to recover from difficulties or failures. It’s often talked about in the realm of computer systems, but applies as well for others systems such as organizations. It’s helpful to classify the level of resilience, so that we can assess the current state of our system and decide if we want to invest in increasing it’s resilience, based on how critical the system is.

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I want to publish this experience, because the information is really spotty and hopefully this will save someone from going thru the same unpleasantness. I kind of hope that some officials responsible for this will read it, but that is a far fetch.

OK, so our plan was to charter a sailboat in Dubrovnik and go visit Montenegro, especially the beautiful Bay of Kotor (Boka Kotorska). When talking to the the charter company, I specifically told them we want to go there and asked if the boat has all the paperwork. Montenegro is not a part of EU, so I expected some bumps on the road. The booking agent assured me that the boat is ready to go there, no problem.

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