All of my thoughts on programming, product development, and more, collected into a timeline of sorts.
So it's finally happened. I've invested in a Steamdeck. After months of (internal) debating between this & a Switch 2, the sale finally pushed me off the fence. Here's some first thoughts I've had around the 'Deck, and what happens next.
(DHH) Google will eventually kill every single service you care about, if they can't find a way to directly monetize it with ads at a scale of billions. They're institutionally incapable of being in the product or service business, because neither products nor services butter Google's bread. Advertisement does.
To address a common GraphQL issue, I tend to build a series of "WhereInput" types into the GraphQL project, which are small reusable inputs throughout the schema, to create a uniform way to filter entries or select a relational entry when creating/updating entries.
Custom domains is an interesting problem for most SaaS business, especially those running on large PaaS/IaaS providers such as AWS or GCP. The problem is, PaaS doesn't help when you want to run custom domains for your SaaS.
(Changelog) Article on the importance of timestamping columns in databases.
(The Verge) Links on Trump's invasion of Congress, as well as a highlight on physical data security.
(Ash Furrow) It's easier to write about a topic when it's fresh in your mind.
(The Verge) A collection of links around Apple's new Silicon chip, detailing power & performance
(The Verge) A number of popular apps and services including Spotify, Pinterest, and Tinder were inaccessible today on iOS devices due to a now-resolved issue involving Facebook log-ins.
(The Verge) WhatsApp went down for its 2 billion users earlier today, but service has now been restored. The issues started at around 4PM ET and prevented WhatsApp users from sending or receiving messages on the service for nearly an hour. The WhatsApp application would still open, but a connecting loop was displayed while the service experienced issues.
(The Verge) This year at CES 2018, the company is showing off Project Linda, a companion piece of hardware for the recently released Razer Phone that extends the smartphone into a full laptop.
In a world dominated by containers & microservices over servers & monoliths, it's important to get your application logs sorted. Here's a brief overview of iterations of application log stacks in production-level applications at Car Throttle.
Sometimes, when you work with emojis 😎😍🤖🌎✊ they can be a real pain in the ass. One physical symbol can equal up to four Unicode characters, so when counting strings & encoding emojis into a valid format for your favourite legacy database, these fun little icons can physically make you 😡
Since I installed Docker on my personal Ubuntu server, I've been diving into the deep end of images & containers. It's a completely different way of developing applications & platforms, and now it's time to bring the Docker way of thinking to my work. Enter AWS, EC2 Container Service and all of the goodies 😝
After reading this excellent article about now Netflix handles scaling & versioning, and also from experience, it's safe to say that writing a versioned API is a pain.
If you follow the nodejs community, you may have recently heard about widespread issues the community encountered when a developer pulled his widely-used dependencies from the registry. Whilst this article is focused on how to decrease the time each staging deployment takes, it also happens to be why the Car Throttle stack was unaffected.
So, if you've ever used Telegram, you'll know how great it is to chat securely between people. And if you're a developer and you've checked out Telegram Bots, you'll know there is an API to allow you to programmatically communicate with people.
KentProjects was a final year project undertaken by myself & my friends over the course of our fourth year at the University Of Kent.
"What about you" - reactionary news app
Organising and running an event in a week!
So I was looking for a way to teach myself NodeJS and MongoDB, so I decided to write an API for an “advice engine”, somewhere to store quotes and display them on a lovely website.
We stopped making Overheard.