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Article Roundup - Week of 8/27/17

Article Roundup

Understanding Failure Modes in Message and Event-based Systems
Error handling is exactly a fun topic, but dealing with errors and failure modes is a necessary part of development. This article goes into detail about the different cases you can run into with a message or event based system. If you use Kafka, RabbitMQ, or any of a host of other messaging systems this is well worth a read.

Kubernetes at GitHub
Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that is approaching the status of de facto standard for micro-services in the cloud. GitHub recently changed their architecture to make use of Kubernetes to speed up deployments and allow for greater flexibility.

APIs First
APIs dictate how you interact with a service or application. At Squarespace they got tired of writing boilerplate code and wanted to focus more on business logic, so they started using code generation. They have been using this approach for 3 years and while there have been some rough spots they are happy with the approach overall.

Open Sourcing Kafka Cruise Control
Kafka is a powerful technology that is widely used, but many still have trouble managing and monitoring it. LinkedIn decided to open-source their solution that automatically rebalances Kafka clusters based on performance goals.

How To Write Better SQL Queries: The Definitive Guide
This is part of a 2-part series on writing better SQL queries, part 2 is available here. SQL is commonly used, even with all these NoSQL DBs floating around. It’s worth understanding how it works and how to write the best queries you can. If you write a bad query it will not be optimized well, so learn how to do it right.

Icon or label?
The use of icons vs labels can be a big debate when it comes to usability. Icons mean different things to different people, but labels can slow people down. Tooltips can work, but not if you have a touchscreen device. This article breaks down the different options and gives you the pros and cons.

The Right Way to Manage Secrets with AWS
It’s important to keep your secrets secret. Just having them in plaintext on a server can put you at risk. If an attacker gets on that server they have those credentials. AWS has a service meant for handling secrets. This article talks about how a company uses AWS’s Parameter Store.