Category Archives: Development

Isomorphic Apps Part 2: Node, React.js, and Socket.io

When I was a kid, I went to the movies to watch Mel Brooks’ “History of The World, Part I”. I had a great time and could not wait for the sequel (that featured, among other things, Hitler on ice, a Viking funeral and laser-shooting rabbis in ‘Jews in Space’ teaser). Alas, ‘Part II’ never came. […]

Micro-Services for Dysfunctional Teams

Update: I have received a ton of feedback on this post, and some of the well meaning criticism is concerned with the term ‘dysfunctional’, considering it a bit ‘judgy’ from somebody that is supposed to help these same teams. Apart from yielding a catchy title, Hacker News reader was spot on when he declared my […]

Should I Build a Site or an App? Yes!

Yes, I know. I stopped blogging to take a desperately needed break. Then I returned only to be hit with a mountain of fresh, ‘hit the ground running’, honest to God January work that knocked the air out of my lungs and pinned me down for a while. Then an IBM colleague tried to ask me […]

Angular.js 2.0, Index Investing and Micro-Services

Now here is somebody with all her eggs in one basket, literarily. I used it to illustrate what index investing tries to avoid. I thought of index investing while reading the bitter and often hilarious reactions to the announced changes in Angular.js 2.0 on Reddit. I also thought about my experience with Google services. Watch me tie all […]

Micro-Services and Page Composition Problem

Dispite many desirable properties, micro-services carry two serious penalties to be contended with: authentication (which we covered in the previous post) and Web page composition, which I intend to address now. Imagine you are writing a Node.js app and use Dust.js for the V of the MVC, as we are doing. Imagine also that several […]

Sharing micro-service authentication using Nginx, Passport and Redis

And we are back with the regularly scheduled programming, and I didn’t talk about micro-services in a while. Here is what is occupying my days now – securing a micro-service system. Breaking down a monolith into a collection of micro-services has some wonderful properties, but also some nasty side-effects. One of them is authentication. The […]

HA All The Things

I hate HA (High Availability). Today everything has to be highly available. All of the sudden SA (Standard Availability) isn’t cutting it any more. Case in point: I used to listen to music on my way to work. Not any more – my morning meeting schedule intrudes into my ride, forcing me to participate in […]

Node.js Apps and Periodic Tasks

When working on a distributed system of any size, sooner or later you will hit a problem and proclaim ‘well, this is a first’. My second proclamation in such situations is ‘this is a nice topic for the blog’. Truth to form, I do it again, this time with the issue of running periodic tasks, […]

Socket.io: Mind the Gap

Welcome to our regular edition of ‘Socket.io version 1.0 watch’ or ‘Making sure Guillermo Rauch is busy working on Socket.io 1.0 instead of whatever he does to pay the rent that does nothing for me’. I am happy to inform you that Socket.io 1.0 is now available, with the new logo and everything. Nice job! […]