Ops, I did it again!

amazon

Amazon ECS Fargate or Why I don't use Kubernetes

🚤tl;dr I haven't had a use-case for Kubernetes that I couldn't solve with AWS ECS Fargate. When I do, I'll look at it. I had a friend ask me about Kubernetes and I told them that this is one of my operational blindspots.

redis Featured

Channeling Away Your PubSub CPU and Memory Usage

We were facing an escalating problem of memory usage that refused to be tamed through horizontal scaling. On closer examination, we discovered that the culprit was none other than our Redis PubSub system that manages multi-user editing, notifications and other websocket-based subscriptions via GraphQL Subscriptions. I'll take you

nextjs

PSA on QSA: Working closely and remotely

How to tighten design/engineering feedback loop iterations.

How to Decrypt Express-OpenID-Connect Session Cookies

I find cookies, sessions, encryption, OpenID and OIDC all very confusing.  I use the express-openid-connect library to handle our Auth0 integration and for the most part it takes care of all the difficult parts of OAuth, tokens, etc.  Eventually you need to peel back the curtain and adjust things. tl;

Apollo GraphQL, Request Logging with Pino

I love using pino for logging in NodeJS.  It's lightweight and provides all the normal logging stuff you'd expect.  It's verbose as hell, and you really need to be ingesting your logs somewhere, like DataDog. Lately I've been tripped up on linking

virtual-assistant

Housekeeping before Hiring a VA

I've written about how to hire a VA [https://blog.dadops.co/2020/11/03/how-to-hire-a-va/].  If you don't already work with someone who manages parts of your life, it can be a bit chaotic.  There's a high chance that I have ADHD based

Save $100/mo with custom domains on Vercel

I love the idea of review apps or pull request.  Where your code in a pull request is server live. I had recently changed the backend of our services to only issue cookies on our personal domain, let's call it myapp.com.  Since we were using Heroku and

server

Servers, Requests, and Responses

If you are new to web development you probably hear terms like servers and requests bandied about. Server is probably the more confusing of the term since it gets conflated with physical hardware, i.e. computers sitting in data-centers. A server, in software-speak, is anything that serves requests at a

What is the full stack?

These days everyone is a "full stack" developer, but what is a full stack? The purple might be your cloud service provider, and the yellow is the code in your web browser."Stack" refers to how we think of the various software layers.  The term is

Routing HTTP Requests

OG Routing With a static HTML site (and the first incarnation of my personal website) you had a file structure like this: mywebsite/ index.html favicon.ico 2021/ why-i-like-she-ra.html And you would run a webserver, or host this somewhere like Netlify that would serve index.html if someone requested

web development

Hallmarks of a good API

Let's dig into an API.  An API can be an HTTP API, but it can also be a software library, or CLI.  I think there are many things which can make an API good or bad, but a few things come to mind fo rme. In general, I

javascript

Copy the current URL to the clipboard in a React app

Interacting with the clipboard used to be hard as there weren't a lot of great browser APIs.  That's changed now.  Here's how to copy the URL of the current page using React.  You don't really need to use React, but I did.

github

Connecting Github Actions across Repositories

I had a request that an iOS swift run command gets triggered every time a deploy was made to a staging server.  This looked like a perfect application for Github Actions [https://github.com/features/actions].  This strategy can be adapted to any CI system. So here's how

tools

Screenshots for Fake Text Messages

I am a fan of small niche single purpose tools.  I was building a landing page for a web site and I wanted a screenshot of a text message. iFake Text Message [https://ifaketextmessage.com] is a simple tool that handles this well.  It's very iMessage-centric.  It let&

virtual-assistant

How to Hire a VA

The 4-hour work week makes hiring a VA look easy. I don't think it's that easy. Here's my process.

database

Constrain yourself

Cleaning data can be hard, the best plan is to avoid it.

Two Screens for Every Bay Area Teacher

tl;dr Skip to How to Help. I spoke about the difficulties at home for remote learning [https://blog.dadops.co/2020/08/23/video-killed-learning/], but another side is the difficulty of remote teaching.  One issue is technology.  It may not be the most important issue, but it's

git

Git and Historical Revision

A well crafted history is a trade off. It's similar to writing tests. Most of the time tests do nothing, but when they raise an alarm it is super handy. With practice, the cost is minimal.

git

The Purpose of Version Control

I think it's rare to see a project not automatically added to Github shortly after, if not before, inception.  It's just a checkbox of writing code.  Previously it was something to think about.Github [https://github.com] (and Bitbucket [http://bitbucket.org], Gitlab [https://gitlab.com/

gifs

Turning Screen Recordings into Animated GIFs✨

So, I love animated GIFs.  Anybody who has worked with me knows that I love them and am quick at posting context-appropriate GIFs into a Slack channel. Apparently, you can use GIFs for serious business. So I had to make a demo for a client, and I used Quicktime Pro&

git

Legible Git History

Everything you produce gets consumed. If you make it easier to consume, it will cause less friction for others as well as yourself.

twitter

Retweeting Revisited

So I cleaned up my twitter feed a little bit, by following my @CityOfSanJoseEN account [https://blog.dadops.co/2020/09/07/retweeting-robot/].  I then noticed that our county, Santa Clara, does the same multi-lingual tweets: > 聖塔克拉拉縣處於紅色風險級別，這意味著更多企業可以在室內營業。目前，一些室內企業和活動的風險仍然過高而不被允許營業。 pic.twitter.com/Om35G9KNuK [https://t.co/Om35G9KNuK] — Santa

twitter

Retweeting Robot

San Jose tweets their updates in multiple languages: > Help out. If you’d like to support wildfire evacuees, please contribute to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation Fire Relief Fund. To donate, visit: https://t.co/YIV2w9lfua #SCULighteningComplex [https://twitter.com/hashtag/SCULighteningComplex?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw]

etiquette

BCC and the Etiquette of Introduction

My rules for introducing people: 1. Usually I suggest it to a person.  "Hey Asif, you should meet Blair.  I know you're looking for X and I think she could help you." 2. Then I double check that Blair's cool with this. "Hey

education Featured

Video Killed The Love of Learning

Technology Problems During a Pandemic 2020 is the year of dumpster fires and distance learning is no exception. For 25 years, technology and education has always been messy. Covid19 has amplified the problems: internet access, device management, Chromebooks, the endless tools and the work of parents as educators. This is