Article Roundup - Week of Apr 01, 2018

Environment Settings in JavaScript Apps
This article provides a nice overview of the common methods to handle the environment specific configuration of a JavaScript frontend.

NGINX strengthens microservices capabilities in new release
NGINX has added new features aimed at microservices. I’m most excited about the possibilities NGINX Unit provides, though it currently only supports Python, PHP, Go, Perl, and Ruby. Node and Java are next on the list.

User-defined Order in SQL
This article is all about being able to reorder items without having to recalculate an index. It shows different techniques with PostgreSQL but these solutions should be transferable to other databases and to programming in general.

Introducing Network Error Logging
Debugging errors that happen on the frontend on someone else’s machine is painful. You can only see so much of the problem from your server logs, and adding all the functionality necessary to the frontend to send back logs only gets you so far. There is a draft proposal to add what is being called Network Error Logging. It’s still in its early stages, but it would provide a mechanism to log network level errors back to the server. It won’t solve all your problems, but it will help with some of the tricky ones.