January 29, 2021
In the vast majority of applications, the database is the source of truth. The database stores critical business records along with irreplaceable user data. So it is imperative that developers have visibility into their databases to diagnose and remedy any potential issues before they impact the business. If they don’t, developers will find unexpected bills at the end of the month that they may not understand.
January 26, 2021
When I first heard about RedwoodJS, I thought it was just another front-end JavaScript framework. I wondered whether it would it be like React or more like Angular. As it turned out, I didn’t have a clue what RedwoodJS was, but now I can’t wait to build more projects using it.
November 17, 2020
“It works fine on my machine!” Perhaps the most famous saying in our industry. Even with the advent of containers that provide consistent environments across the SDLC, we still hear developers fall back to this claim when a defect is found. But in the end, if the code doesn’t work in test or production, it doesn’t work—even if it works locally. So as a developer, being able to deep dive into your containerized application to fix the problem—regardless of the environment—is a critical skill we must all learn.
November 10, 2020
Open-source application diversity is both the biggest boon in the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movement, and its greatest hindrance to adoption. You don’t always own the application you’re consuming, and it often comes with certain opinions and limitations imposed by the software author—either intentionally or otherwise.
November 9, 2020
In the last several years, Google’s Kubernetes project has generated huge buzz. The project has grown and evolved into a titan of the cloud infrastructure world. While it’s a great project and serves many purposes, it remains a complex beast. Even with the managed Kubernetes services from major cloud providers, teams have to maintain complex, interwoven architectures using an ever-expanding cosmos of plugins and paradigm shifts. With such complexity inherent with its flexibility, Kubernetes requires its own set of skills in order to implement, maintain, upgrade, and operate this diverse orchestration ecosystem.
November 3, 2020
In this article, we’re going to walk through some of the basic setup for Slash GraphQL and then take a look at how I built a Pokémon Pokédex app with React and Slash GraphQL in just a few hours! Frontend developers want interacting with the backend of their web application to be as painless as possible. Requesting data from the database or making updates to records stored in the database should be simple so that frontend developers can focus on what they do best: creating beautiful and intuitive user interfaces.
October 30, 2020
As long as I can remember, I’ve included log messages in my code to provide run-time insight into what the code is really doing. From developers running locally all the way to the eyes of a production support engineer, these extra lines of code are meant to help troubleshoot unexpected scenarios.
June 15, 2020
In the “Moving Away From AWS and Onto Heroku” article, I provided an introduction of the application I wanted to migrate from Amazon’s popular AWS solution to Heroku. Subsequently, the “Destination Heroku” article illustrated the establishment of a new Heroku account and focused on introducing a Java API (written in Spring Boot) connecting to a ClearDB instance within this new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) ecosystem.
June 9, 2020
Do you have an app on Heroku using Postgres? Are you running out of database connections? Maybe you’ve already tried setting CONN_MAX_AGE, but that only helped for a while. It’s time for PgBouncer, the de facto standard for Postgres connection pooling. In this article, we’ll look at how to use PgBouncer to scale your app on Heroku. We’ll use Django, a popular python web framework, as an example for the settings.
May 22, 2020
I love side projects. They give me the opportunity to flex my creative muscles and tinker with tech like the Internet of Things (IoT) in new ways. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far for my next one; a common conundrum for pet owners fueled this concept for an IoT dog collar.
