Article Roundup - December 7, 2018

Simple and Easy Mentorship with a Mentoring Agreement
At work, we have a concept called “Managing Consultant”. Everyone has one and they are basically your manager for everything other than money and discipline, they are there to help you with your career and help advise you. Basically a formal mentor. It’s something I’m interested in working towards and I think this type of agreement could be a helpful tool for establishing the right relationship and to keep things runnings smoothly.

Effective Docker HealthChecks For Node.js
It’s no good to deploy your application and never check if it is actually healthy. Sure, hitting an API endpoint works but it doesn’t give you a very good idea of health. This article is focused on Node and Docker, but the concept can be applied anywhere. Instead of checking for a response actually check that you can connect to your databases or whatever is important to your application.

NGINX Unit Now Supports TLS and JavaScript Apps with Node.js
NGINX Unit is a dynamic web and application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages, and it now supports TLS and Node apps. The TLS aspect is nice, but I really like that it now supports Node. If you try and run Node apps with a nginx web server you end up configuring a proxy and then you still have to manage the Node process. This should be a much better alternative, I just wish it didn’t require a special NPM package.