Working with design papers
05 Oct 2021
Even when we were not all working remotely we had them, but remote work has made the use of design papers to prepare, discuss and structure major engineering initiatives even more useful. This is a brief overview of the approach, from a simple one to a very structured one. The
Docker for local development
15 Sep 2021
With a move to multiple services or even, with a monolith, multiple services as dependencies (rabbitmq, redis and postgreSQL for example) the multiplication of services to have running in a development environment tends to make things complicated. Multiple issues tend to appear as both the number of those services and
Application Performance Monitoring
21 Mar 2021
What tools do we advise our customers to use and why we picked AppSignal as the default one to recommend.
Building up : Looping back
11 Jan 2021
Building a styleguide, a set of guide lines, establishing ways to monitor and know how the product runs, automating what can be, hosting and running the product, all these are key elements to build a technical culture within a technical company.
Building up : Handling Issues
07 Jan 2021
Aside of performance metrics one important thing to keep an eye on for your production environments is the number of errors they are throwing and what's going on in the logs.
Building up : StartingUp
05 Jan 2021
Gone are the times where we would host our websites in our dorm, garage or office on a klinky server with the electrical plug scotched to the wall with a big "do not unplug" sign on it.
Building up : Automate
23 Dec 2020
Many battles are to be fought in projects so it's key to choose your battles and avoid as many as you can. Styleguides and guidelines are, as we saw previously, key to ease the day to day work by avoiding extra work.
Building up : Scaling in
21 Dec 2020
Once the team has started to adopt even an embryo of styleguides it's time to move onto the meatier things. Again, it helps to put some guiding lines for the team to see how and where to go.
Building up : Product and performance metrics
18 Dec 2020
Code does not evolve in a vacuum. It does not appear from nowhere, it does not just run on the developers computer and it does not just end in the code repository. Let's see how to keep an eye on the impact of changes.
Building up : Styleguide
16 Dec 2020
It all start with style in which one writes code. It's the form, not the function that is first apparent when one looks at a code base. This form is the style used by the authors of the code base : the specific way to write using the programming language(s), the way to name and organize files.
Pass : Open Source to the rescue
29 May 2020
Using a password manager has become very important to avoid plenty of issues. So with the move to a Linux workstation using an OpenSource solution made a lot of sense.
Howto : Private git hosting
13 May 2020
In this article we will see how to setup a set of : - a git repositories server and service - a web interface to manager users, groups, and repositories - a load balancer to handle SSL termination in front of the git hosting service
New system
10 May 2020
After years using an Apple Laptop as my main work machine I started to grow annoyed by the frequent power up of the ventilation inside the laptop. I also noticed some bugs within the OS that would trigger impromptu restarts, network issues that would require me to restart the system
Release : Jekyll transistor gem
08 May 2020
Some time ago I decided to move all my audio episodes from Soundcloud to [Transistor](https://transistor.fm/). I wanted something that didn't cost too much, that I could still include in the Jekyll page and that would help a bit with publishing to whatever audience was reached.
On feature switches
24 Mar 2020
Once a team has a stable and trusted way to get releases deployed quickly and potentially multiple times during a day it becomes very useful to have a way to switch features or changes ON and OFF in the production environment.
Ephemeral containers for ssh
12 Mar 2020
When I setup docker based infrastructures for projects I have usually a few use cases that need to be solved. Usually it starts with starting http services containers, background workers containers and console ones. Let us see how to handle the last case.
A repository template
06 Feb 2020
I decided to do a little experiment for a mini service I am playing with at the moment : have more than just code in the repository. Let's see what else we could have alongside the code.
Surprise : I am mixing your data
23 Jan 2020
When it comes to doing SQL queries onto a relational database there is a time when this query needs to use rows from two tables to give you the rows you want. These are called “join” queries. Their purpose is to combines records from two tables, let's see how that can end up.
Memoization and RubyOnRails
23 Jan 2020
Often with RubyOnRails (and other Ruby frameworks) we rely on instance variables and the or-equals operator (||=) to store some expensive data in memory to avoid costly database or API queries : this is called memoization.
Custom keyboards and split designs
29 Dec 2019
Back when I was at University near Paris a friend of mine was always talking about how great his ergonomic keyboard was so good and how his typing was better. Years later I was the one doing the same about the keyboard I got. Well, here I am, again, talking about split keyboards.
Opinions
Working with design papers
05 Oct 2021
Even when we were not all working remotely we had them, but remote work has made the use of design papers to prepare, discuss and structure major engineering initiatives even more useful. This is a brief overview of the approach, from a simple one to a very structured one. The
A case for hybrid backends
22 Feb 2019
I have published a few posts about Ruby backends, AWS EC2 and using SNS/SQS in the past. Lately I have done and pushed some experiments further to use a lot more from AWS compute services rather than just hosting the services there.