I recently went to a conference where there were several talks on microservices, an architectural pattern that my team at work has been looking at for a while. These were all generally high-level talks about the pros, cons, and use cases for microservices. I was kind of disappointed in the first one when the speaker said specifically that microservices are not good for small teams. It makes sense, but I would say at two and a half developers, our team is pretty small. So after that talk I took some time to reflect.
SPA Deployment
I just deployed a MEAN stack app. It went pretty smoothly, but required some manual steps I’ll need to work out how to automate. I also need to add some security and set up HTTPS. That should be pretty simple with Let’s Encrypt, but I have to make sure communication between the frontend and backend apps isn’t interrupted.
Socket Programming
Socket programming is something I’ve been interested in since I first learned about WebSockets. Since I got into programming as a web developer, without a background in computer science, it’s a pretty strange concept for me. I’m used to the request/response cycle of HTTP, obviously with a bit of AJAX mixed in to make it feel more interactive. I understand the concept behind sockets and have made a couple small projects with WebSockets, but actually building a custom socket-based application is a bit different.
That Conference
Last week I went to That Conference. It was a great time, meeting other developers, getting some new ideas from the talks, and talking to other people in the industry.
Back to Sublime Text
I was really happy with Vim for a long time. In fact, I just last month learned how to use “vi-mode” in the ruby console. I have tried various editors vim emulation options, but they never quite feel natural. Visual Studio’s VsVim was the best I had found, it actually supports a vimrc file you can use with standard VimScript. VS Code, Atom, and Sublime Text all have their own vim plugins or settings, but they’re either limited or buggy. Part of it is my own dependency on plugins, some of which I still haven’t found decent alternatives for. But really, if I can’t navigate using the home row keys through my file tree, buffer, or panels, it just doesn’t feel like vim anyway.
Linux Development Environment
I’m back on a Linux dev environment. Well, I never completely left, because I’ve always had Linux servers running my Rails apps. But I only ever had Linux as my desktop for a little while when I started working in the Surgery department. It had a few unfortunate errors that may have been related to the hard drive of that computer, which ended up being replaced. But I ended up switching back to Windows, as suggested by our sysadmin. Continue reading “Linux Development Environment”
Alternatives to Angular
Back when Angular, Ember, and React were first gaining popularity and Single-Page Applications(SPAs) were less common, I chose to learn Angular as my SPA framework. Continue reading “Alternatives to Angular”