
Jason Butz is a software engineer and cloud architect with a strong focus on JavaScript, TypeScript, Node, and AWS. Jason has a love for open-soure software and a passion for building scalable, secure, and reliable applications.
- AWS has great services for building a resilient static website and it isn't difficult, the real challenge comes with deploying it through infrastructure as code
AWS Prescriptive Guidance
January 10, 2023 • AWS, ArchitectureUse the AWS prescriptive guidance library to help build effective solutions and accelerate your cloud journeyTracking Unhandled JavaScript Errors with Plausible.io
September 02, 2022 • plausible.io, analyticsUsing Lambda Function URLs to Collect Form Submissions
April 10, 2022 • AWS, LambdaThis past week AWS announced Lambda Function URLs, public endpoints you can enable for Lambda functions to allow them to be invoked. These…
Invoking AWS Lambda Functions from API Gateway and SQS
April 19, 2021 • AWS, API Gateway, SQS, LambdaI’ve noticed people trying to return HTTP status codes from AWS Lambda functions when those functions are set up to receive events from SQS…
AWS API Gateway Authorizers & Default Responses
July 02, 2020 • AWS, API GatewayA coworker of mine recently was having issues with calling an AWS API Gateway he had deployed. He was getting responses but no Lambda…
Article Roundup - May 22, 2020
May 22, 2020 • Article RoundupSpotify’s Failed #SquadGoals
Remember those super cool videos from Spotify on how they set up their agile teams? The ones that get you all…Article Roundup - April 17, 2020
April 17, 2020 • Article RoundupMy favourite Git commit
It’s worth it to put some effort into git commit messages, especially when the change is truly consequential. This…Article Roundup - April 3, 2020
April 03, 2020 • Article RoundupAll Pluralsight Content is Free in April
Pluralsight has opened up its content for free in April. I’ve used their videos in the past and…Article Roundup - March 13, 2020
March 13, 2020 • Article RoundupReady for changes with Hexagonal Architecture
An internal development group was tasked with building an application that would touch a wide…Article Roundup - March 6, 2020
March 06, 2020 • Article RoundupGraphQL In Action: Introduction
GraphQL has been gaining a lot of popularity in recent years, and some of that for good reason. Instead of…Article Roundup - February 28, 2020
February 28, 2020 • Article RoundupAmazon and commercial open source in the cloud: It’s complicated
The war between open source and Amazon/Insert Large Cloud Corporation Here…Article Roundup - February 21, 2020
February 21, 2020 • Article RoundupBest Practices for Secondary Indexes with DynamoDB - CloudProse
This is an excellent overview of AWS DynamoDB Secondary Index best practices…Article Roundup - February 14, 2020
February 14, 2020 • Article RoundupSupercharge your command line experience: GitHub CLI is now in beta
If you work with GitHub and are frequently working in your terminal you…Article Roundup - February 7, 2020
February 07, 2020 • Article RoundupConference Talk Proposal Examples
Speaking at conferences is a great way to help your career, it gets your name out there and helps you…Article Roundup - January 31, 2020
January 31, 2020 • Article RoundupClean Code concepts adapted for JavaScript
Every example I can remember in Clean Code was in Java. That’s not necessarily an issue, but it…Article Roundup - January 24, 2020
January 24, 2020 • Article RoundupNo, dynamic type systems are not inherently more open
There is a battle between static and dynamic typing in the programming world, and the…Article Roundup - January 17, 2020
January 17, 2020 • Article RoundupFrom 15,000 database connections to under 100: DigitalOcean’s tale of tech debt
Tech debt can be a nasty thing, but when the scale of your…Article Roundup - January 10, 2020
January 10, 2020 • Article RoundupDeming’s Rules of Management and Agile Methods
This article lists out W. Edwards Deming’s 14 key principles for transforming business…Article Roundup - January 3, 2020
January 03, 2020 • Article RoundupBeware SAFe (the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise), an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness
I’ve recently started on a project that is using…Article Roundup - December 13, 2019
December 13, 2019 • Article RoundupIt’s been another one-article kind of week.
Peacetime Productivity, Wartime Productivity
When you have room to breathe and things are calm…Article Roundup - December 6, 2019
December 06, 2019 • Article RoundupI started a new project this week so it’s been long and I’ve been busy. So here’s one good solid link.
The Amazon Builders’ Library
There…Article Roundup - November 22, 2019
November 22, 2019 • Article RoundupThe Relationship Between Modularity and Polymorphism
How much of your Object-Oriented theory do you remember? I don’t generally remember…Article Roundup - November 15, 2019
November 15, 2019 • Article RoundupArticle Roundup - November 8, 2019
November 08, 2019 • Article RoundupAddressing Technical Debt
Let’s talk about technical debt. You have it, I guarantee it. Maybe you’re lucky and it isn’t much, but it is…Article Roundup - November 1, 2019
November 01, 2019 • Article RoundupTechnical Considerations to Help Scale Your Product
It’s important to ensure you “right-size” your application. Scaling it to be too big too…Article Roundup - October 25, 2019
October 25, 2019 • Article RoundupHow To Maximize Value at Tech Conferences (as an Introvert)
Conferences can be nerve-wracking and draining for a lot of people. I know they…Article Roundup - October 18, 2019
October 18, 2019 • Article RoundupRules of Thumb for Software Engineering
There are plenty of great sources for details on programming guidelines, but it takes a bit of time…Article Roundup - October 11, 2019
October 11, 2019 • Article RoundupDon’t lead by example
The title is a little misleading, it’s not that you shouldn’t lead by example. It’s that you need to chill out, set…Article Roundup - October 4, 2019
October 04, 2019 • Article RoundupHacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean and DEV
Hacktoberfest is here! Contribute to the open-source community during the month of October…Article Roundup - September 27, 2019
September 27, 2019 • Article RoundupDecoupling Technical Code from Business Logic with Hexagonal Architecture
When building an application you want to try and keep your…Article Roundup - September 20, 2019
September 20, 2019 • Article RoundupDon’t get locked up into avoiding lock-in
If I had to select a single article to send out, it would be this one. A lot of people get worked…Article Roundup - September 13, 2019
September 13, 2019 • Article RoundupJakarta EE 8: The new era of Java EE explained - Red Hat Developer
I’ve always been a bit fuzzy on the alphabet soup that is Java, but I’m…Article Roundup - September 6, 2019
September 06, 2019 • Article RoundupReact Hooks Mini Crash Course
React Hooks have been out for a bit now, but I haven’t had the chance to work with them or sit down and learn…Article Roundup - August 30, 2019
August 30, 2019 • Article RoundupComposing better emails
No matter how much you like your chat application, you probably are still sending a lot of emails. Take the time and…Article Roundup - August 23, 2019
August 23, 2019 • Article RoundupGet your work recognized: write a brag document
Have you ever been asked for a list of what all you accomplished in a given time period and…Article Roundup - August 16, 2019
August 16, 2019 • Article RoundupTwo Good Practices Agile Says You Don’t Need - DZone Agile
There isn’t much consistency in Agile, just the principals. Beyond that, it is…Article Roundup - August 9, 2019
August 09, 2019 • Article RoundupWhy We Need To Talk About Burnout In The Tech Industry
Burnout seems to be a common thing in the technology industry, but that isn’t healthy…Article Roundup - August 2, 2019
August 02, 2019 • Article RoundupArticle Roundup - July 26, 2019
July 26, 2019 • Article RoundupThe Evolution of Comcast’s Architecture Guild
Software architecture can get tricky in a large organization. You could have every team do…Article Roundup - July 19, 2019
July 19, 2019 • Article RoundupObject-Oriented Programming — The Trillion Dollar Disaster 🤦
This is certainly a divisive article, but it lays out a pretty good argument…Article Roundup - July 12, 2019
July 12, 2019 • Article RoundupUK ISP group names Mozilla ‘Internet Villain’ for supporting ‘DNS-over-HTTPS’
Mozilla is adding DNS over HTTPS to Firefox, and it’s not…Article Roundup - June 28, 2019
June 28, 2019 • Article RoundupFirefox Will Give You a Fake Browsing History to Fool Advertisers
Tired of all those ads following you around the internet and being super…Article Roundup - June 21, 2019
June 21, 2019 • Article RoundupUp your Git game and clean up your history
If you use git for version control (which you probably do if you are doing any kind of version…Article Roundup - June 14, 2019
June 14, 2019 • Article RoundupI thought I could live without iMessage — and I was wrong
This article isn’t as technical as many are, but I went with it because it is more…Article Roundup - June 7, 2019
June 07, 2019 • Article RoundupAssessing Your Options for Real-Time Message Buses
Today data busses and event streams are being needed more and more to handle the amount…Article Roundup - May 31, 2019
May 31, 2019 • Article RoundupMicrosoft launches React Native for Windows
React Native allows you to build native, or near-native, iOS and Android applications with React…Article Roundup - May 24, 2019
May 24, 2019 • Article RoundupTrans-inclusive Design
You hopefully remembered timezones when building your application, you may have even remembered to support more than…Article Roundup - May 17, 2019
May 17, 2019 • Article RoundupAnnouncing Microsoft Web Template Studio
Microsoft has announced a new extension for Visual Studio Code called Web Template Studio. It’s…Article Roundup - May 10, 2019
May 10, 2019 • Article RoundupMicrosoft has some great resources around software architectures and modern application architecture. I found these when looking for a good…
Article Roundup - May 3, 2019
May 03, 2019 • Article RoundupTinder’s move to Kubernetes
If you are interested in Kubernetes or running applications using containers this article is worth a read…Connascence - The Language You Have Been Needing in Code Review
April 25, 2019 • Connascence, Code ReviewToday I was attending Indy.Code() and I attended a single talk that I think will make the entire time at the conference worthwhile. The…
Article Roundup - April 19, 2019
April 19, 2019 • Article RoundupWhy software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model
Estimating software projects is hard and the bigger they get the…Article Roundup - April 12, 2019
April 12, 2019 • Article RoundupNaming Conventions Do’s and Don’ts
Your class, function, and variable names matter. If you have read Clean Code, Pragmatic Programmer, or a…Article Roundup - April 5, 2019
April 05, 2019 • Article RoundupEnriching Event-Driven Architectures with AWS Event Fork Pipelines
Event-Driven architectures are a popular way to deal with applications…Article Roundup - March 29, 2019
March 29, 2019 • Article Roundup5 steps for Disagreeing Effectively
Ever strongly disagreed with something, tried to push back, and gotten shut down? I have. You can’t win…Let's Encrypt - Cloudflare
March 26, 2019 • Let's Encrypt, Cloudflare, SSL, HTTPSLet’s Encrypt and certbot are wonderful and make it easy, and cheap, to get SSL certificates setup. But sometimes your application or site…
Article Roundup - March 22, 2019
March 22, 2019 • Article RoundupCloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing
I haven’t read the paper referenced here, but it is something I very…Article Roundup - March 15, 2019
March 15, 2019 • Article RoundupPrinciples of Modern Application Development
This is a large article, but it is tackling a large topic: modern application development. They…Article Roundup - March 8, 2019
March 08, 2019 • Article RoundupOpenAI built a text generator so good, it’s considered too dangerous to release
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research…Article Roundup - March 1, 2019
March 01, 2019 • Article RoundupRide the Serverless Wave with DigitalOcean’s One-click Droplet
Do you want to take advantage of serverless technology but not deal with…Article Roundup - February 22, 2019
February 22, 2019 • Article RoundupUnderstanding Database Sharding
This article doesn’t focus on one database technology in particular but instead focuses on the theory of…Article Roundup - February 15, 2019
February 15, 2019 • Article RoundupWhat’s New in ES2019: Array flat and flatMap, Object.fromEntries
ES2019 has been finalized! Prepare yourself for a small handful of new…Article Roundup - February 8, 2019
February 08, 2019 • Article RoundupHow to Rewrite Your Bedrock Application While Remaining Operational
It’s tough to get buy-in that your whole application needs to be…Article Roundup - February 1, 2019
February 01, 2019 • Article RoundupBig Win for Web Accessibility in Domino’s Pizza Case
I didn’t expect I would ever include an article from a law office, but here we are…Article Roundup - January 25, 2019
January 25, 2019 • Article Roundup18F Methods
Design isn’t all about “making it look pretty”. Design is about making something usable and easy to look at. This site is…Article Roundup - January 18, 2019
January 18, 2019 • Article RoundupMother of All Breaches Exposes 773 Million Emails, 21 Million Passwords
There has been a large dump of email addresses and passwords and…Article Roundup - January 11, 2019
January 11, 2019 • Article RoundupAmazon DocumentDB
AWS has released a new database service called DocumentDB that is compatible with the MongoDB 3.6 API. This new product…Article Roundup - January 4, 2019
January 04, 2019 • Article RoundupInfinite Data Structures In JavaScript
This is an interesting exercise in iterators, generators, and general data structures and is worth a…Article Roundup - December 21, 2018
December 21, 2018 • Article RoundupMicrosoft Edge: Making the web better through more open source collaboration
Microsoft announced that they will be contributing to Chromium…Node.js Job Scheduling with Agenda
December 19, 2018 • node, javascript, agenda.jsI have a freelance project I’ve been working on that needed to be setup to allow tasks to be retried automatically. The application depends…
Article Roundup - December 14, 2018
December 14, 2018 • Article RoundupManaging Kubernetes Just Got a Lot Simpler
Another cloud provider has entered the managed Kubernetes cluster arena. DigitalOcean opened…GitHub GraphQL Thoughts
December 14, 2018 • github, graphqlGitHub\'s GraphQL API is nice, but the documentation still has a ways to goLive Process Output To The User With Redis and Server-Sent Events
December 13, 2018 • Node, Redis, Server-Sent Events, ExpressIn a recent project I needed to collect the output from a process that was occurring on the server and output it to the user on the frontend…
Article Roundup - December 7, 2018
December 07, 2018 • Article RoundupSimple and Easy Mentorship with a Mentoring Agreement
At work, we have a concept called “Managing Consultant”. Everyone has one and they are…Article Roundup - November 30, 2018
November 30, 2018 • Article RoundupCloud Diagrams & Notes
This site has a cool collection of graphics and cheat sheets for different aspects of Amazon AWS. A lot of them look…Article Roundup - November 23, 2018
November 23, 2018 • Article RoundupThe State of JavaScript 2018
The 2018 State of JavaScript report has been released. I haven’t dug through the results but there are always…Article Roundup - November 16, 2018
November 16, 2018 • Article RoundupSimple Git Rebases
I’m tooting my own horn here, but this is an article I wrote that I felt was especially helpful. Git rebases get a very…Article Roundup - November 09, 2018
November 09, 2018 • Article RoundupIntroducing reCAPTCHA v3: the new way to stop bots
Google has announced their latest version of reCAPTCHA. This time it is an API that…Article Roundup - November 02, 2018
November 02, 2018 • Article RoundupThe Illustrated TLS Connection: Every Byte Explained
Have you ever wanted to really understand TLS? I mean really understand it? TLS is used…Simple Git Rebases
November 02, 2018 • gitLearning to make appropriate use of `git rebase` can help you ensure your git commit log makes sense and is easy to follow.Article Roundup - October 26, 2018
October 26, 2018 • Article RoundupMODALZ MODALZ MODALZ
Modals can be a divisive subject when building applications. This site gives some different options and advice around…Article Roundup - October 19, 2018
October 19, 2018 • Article RoundupWhat’s a senior engineer’s job?
This is a nice opinion article talking about what is and isn’t a senior software engineer’s job. I do have…Article Roundup - October 12, 2018
October 12, 2018 • Article RoundupKubernetes: The Surprisingly Affordable Platform for Personal Projects
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system and has…Article Roundup - October 5, 2018
October 05, 2018 • Article RoundupInside look at modern web browser
This is the first of a four-part series (all four parts are out) that provides a view into the…Article Roundup - September 28, 2018
September 28, 2018 • Article RoundupUnderstanding the Difference Between CI and CD
Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment all mean different…Article Roundup - September 21, 2018
September 21, 2018 • Article RoundupThe State Of JavaScript 2018
The State of JavaScript 2018 survey is out. It can take a while to fill out, but it can do a great job taking…Article Roundup - September 14, 2018
September 14, 2018 • Article RoundupStrategies for implementing user authentication in serverless applications
Authentication should always involve some deep thinking, you want…Article Roundup - September 7, 2018
September 07, 2018 • Article RoundupUsing the React DevTools Profiler to Diagnose React App Performance Issues
The React DevTools received an update recently that added a new…Article Roundup - August 31, 2018
August 31, 2018 • Article RoundupServerless Best Practices – Paul Johnston – Medium
Serverless architecture has been around for a bit now so it’s important to know the best…Article Roundup - August 24, 2018
August 24, 2018 • Article RoundupSetting up constants via proxies
This is not a long article, but it is a great example of how you can use the Proxy class in JS. It also…Article Roundup - August 17, 2018
August 17, 2018 • Article RoundupRemoving Babel’s Stage Presets · Babel
Babel has been making a lot of changes recently with v7. One of the newer changes is removing the ES…Server-Sent Events With Node
August 16, 2018 • JavaScript, Node, Express, Server-Sent EventsServer-Sent Events (SSEs) allow one-way communication from the server to the client. They can be very useful for things like notifications or activity feeds.Article Roundup - August 10, 2018
August 10, 2018 • Article RoundupHow we scaled nginx and saved the world 54 years every day
Cloudflare handles a large chunk of internet traffic between DNS and CDN features…Article Roundup - August 3, 2018
August 03, 2018 •Logging Activity With The Web Beacon API
Sometimes your app has an error that keeps happening for the user, but you can’t figure out what is…Article Roundup - Week of July 22, 2018
July 27, 2018 • Article RoundupHere’s the final nail in the coffin of open plan offices
This research may “put the final nail in the coffin” for open office plans, but…Article Roundup - Week of July 15, 2018
July 20, 2018 • Article RoundupVS Code Can Do That?
I’m a big fan of VS Code. This site showcases a lot of features and extensions that you may not know about.Using API Gateways to Facilitate Your Transition from Monolith to Microservices
Transitioning a monolithic application into a collection of services is quite the challenge. One often overlooked tool to help with that migration is an API Gateway. This article goes through some of…Article Roundup - Week of July 8, 2018
July 13, 2018 • Article RoundupThe State of Developer Ecosystem 2018
JetBrains has recently released their “State of Developer Ecosystem” report. It’s something…Article Roundup - Week of July 1, 2018
July 06, 2018 • Article RoundupDon’t Use The Placeholder Attribute
This article makes a strong case as to why the placeholder attribute added to input elements in HTML…Article Roundup - Week of June 24, 2018
June 29, 2018 • Article RoundupUTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?
Read this, even if you ignore everything elseOne of the fastest ways to gauge a developer’s experience…
Article Roundup - Week of Jun 17, 2018
June 22, 2018 • Article RoundupHow Git Changed The History of Software Version Control
I remember the days before Git when Subversion was the main VCS. It worked just fine…Article Roundup - Week of Jun 10, 2018
June 15, 2018 • Article RoundupHow to display a “new version available” of your Progressive Web App
Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to easily let your users know when a…Article Roundup - Week of Jun 03, 2018
June 08, 2018 • Article RoundupDRY to the point of WET yak shaving
DRY is a great principle, but it is just that: a principle. This article does a good job of going…Article Roundup - Week of May 27, 2018
June 01, 2018 • Article RoundupCSS Grid Builder
This is a very cool tool that makes building CSS grids super easy.Tips for High Availability – Netflix Technology Blog – Medium
When it comes to high availablity you know Netflix knows what they are talking about. If you have been a subscriber long enough you’ll know they have always been pretty good, but have gotten even better in recent years. This article goes through some tips from…String Length & Bytes In JavaScript
May 29, 2018 • JavaScript, NodeIn most cases, you can assume one character in a string is 1 byte, but that is only in most cases. How many bytes do you think
ü
is? It turns…Article Roundup - Week of May 20, 2018
May 25, 2018 • Article RoundupA Gentle Introduction to Prepack, Part 1
Prepack is a tool that optimizes JavaScript. It’s still in early development. This article is quite…Article Roundup - Week of May 13, 2018
May 18, 2018 • Article RoundupThe Eponymous Laws of Tech
This is just a fun collection of all those laws and such things you find used in tech frequently. Occam’s Razor…Article Roundup - Week of May 06, 2018
May 11, 2018 • Article RoundupTesting Strategies for React and Redux
Mozilla recently ported the Firefox extensions and themes website to React and Redux. This article…Article Roundup - Week of Apr 29, 2018
May 04, 2018 • Article RoundupMario Kart: CSS
This is just plain cool. It’s an article about creating a MarioKart-like interface, that is interactive, with just CSS.Designing very large (JavaScript) applications
This article is more or less a transcript of a talk that was given at JSConf Australia by Malte Ubl, from Google. It goes through a lot of the decisions he’s made…Restarting Your Node App After Changes
May 03, 2018 • javascript, nodeA nice feature of tools like create-react-app, angular-cli, webpack, and many others is the ability to reload your application when you make…
Article Roundup - Week of Apr 22, 2018
April 27, 2018 • Article RoundupAngular 6 wants to be smaller, faster and easier-to-use
I recently started trying to learn Angular. The documentation is good, there are…Article Roundup - Week of Apr 15, 2018
April 20, 2018 • Article RoundupArticle Roundup - Week of Apr 08, 2018
April 12, 2018 • Article RoundupReact Lifecycle
It’s only a tweet, but it is a very handy visualization of the React component lifecycle.Article Roundup - Week of Apr 01, 2018
April 06, 2018 • Article RoundupEnvironment Settings in JavaScript Apps
This article provides a nice overview of the common methods to handle the environment specific…Article Roundup - Week of Mar 25, 2018
March 30, 2018 • Article RoundupA blockchain in 200 lines of code
The idea behind blockchains isn’t that complicated. I like to think of it has a verifiable linked list…Article Roundup - Week of Mar 18, 2018
March 23, 2018 • Article RoundupA Practical Introduction to Container Terminology
This is a long article, but it’s worth it to get the terminology for containers if you’re…#DeleteFacebook - Videos
March 21, 2018 • Facebook, Greasemonkey#DeleteFacebook is still be going strong, and I have another Greasemonkey script for those who can’t delete their entire Facebook just yet.
…
#DeleteFacebook - Albums
March 20, 2018 • Facebook, Greasemonkey#DeleteFacebook is getting a lot of momentum and I would love nothing more than to delete my Facebook. I haven’t really even been using it…
Article Roundup - Week of Mar 11, 2018
March 16, 2018 • Article RoundupStack Overflow Developer Survey 2018
StackOverflow’s 2018 developer survey results are out. It’s a lot of data and perusing it was…Article Roundup - Week of Mar 04, 2018
March 09, 2018 • Article RoundupThe real cause of large DDoS
This past week GitHub announced that it was the target of a massive DDoS attack. These kinds of attacks are…Article Roundup - Week of Feb 25, 2018
March 02, 2018 • Article RoundupJavaScript Pipeline Operator | MDN
There is a proposal to add the pipeline operator to JavaScript. The pipeline operator would make…Article Roundup - Week of Feb 18, 2018
February 23, 2018 • Article RoundupPhaser
If you’re looking to make in-browser games you might want to take a look at Phaser. It’s a 2D game framework written in JavaScript.We’re nearing the 7.0 Babel release. Here’s all the cool stuff we’ve been doing.
A new version of Babel is coming, and you’ll need to make some changes to the packages…Article Roundup - Week of Feb 11, 2018
February 16, 2018 • Article RoundupWebAssembly Studio
Mozilla created an online IDE for building simple WebAssembly apps in C or Rust. It’s a lot of fun to play around with…Article Roundup - Week of Feb 04, 2018
February 09, 2018 • Article RoundupLet’s make multi-colored icons with SVG symbols and CSS variables
Icon fonts, like Font Awesome, are great but they don’t allow you to have…Article Roundup - Week of Jan 28, 2018
February 02, 2018 • Article RoundupDecouple Business Logic using Async Generators
Generators are a newer feature to JavaScript and they can provide you with a lot of power…Article Roundup - Week of Jan 21, 2018
January 26, 2018 • Article RoundupAsynchronous JavaScript: Async/Await Tutorial
Asynchronous JS with async/await is easier to teach than Promises and yields even cleaner…Article Roundup - Week of Jan 14, 2018
January 19, 2018 • Article Roundup2017 JavaScript Rising Stars
This is a breakdown of some of the more popular JavaScript frameworks and tools based on stars on GitHubIntroduction to modern network load balancing and proxying
This article covers load balancers and proxying in great detail. It is a longer read, but…Article Roundup - Week of Jan 7, 2018
January 12, 2018 • Article RoundupSpectre and Meltdown have been in the news lately, in addition to OS manufacturers browsers are attempting to mitigate the issue. It is…
Article Roundup - Week of Dec 31, 2017
January 05, 2018 • Article Roundup8 Best Practices for Perfect CSS Documentation
Documenting CSS is totally a thing, and it gets more important as the size of your…Article Roundup - Week of Dec 17, 2017
December 22, 2017 • Article RoundupSpeed up Your Node.js App with Native Addons
Node’s optimizer can do a lot, but sometimes writing an algorithm in C++ is better for your…Article Roundup - Week of Dec 10, 2017
December 15, 2017 • Article RoundupHow Stripe Designs Beautiful Websites
This article goes over some tips and tricks Stripe uses when designing websites. It’s a lot of small…Article Roundup - Week of Dec 3, 2017
December 08, 2017 • Article RoundupIn The Works – Amazon Aurora Serverless
I am very excited about this product; it seems perfect for hobby projects. If you’re already paying…Article Roundup - Week of Nov 26, 2017
December 01, 2017 • Article RoundupVS Code Can Do That?
VS Code is an excellent editor, and this site has great tricks I never knew aboutTechnology Trends for 2017 | Technology Radar
ThoughtWorks has put out their latest edition of their technology radar. They keep an eye on techniques, tools, platforms, languages and frameworks and have a short write up and a rating on how they expect to see things go. These ratings are based around their usage of them as a company, but they provide an interesting insight. Keep in mind they do archive things off the radar once it has reached a point where they don’t see any changes occuring around their…Article Roundup - Week of Nov 19, 2017
November 24, 2017 • Article RoundupLearn Async/Await by Example
If you haven’t yet learned how to use JavaScripts async and await keywords it is worth it. They allow you use…Article Roundup - Week of Nov 12, 2017
November 17, 2017 • Article Roundup5 React 16 Features You Can’t Live Without
This is a nice runthrough of some of the most important updates that came with the latest version…Bootstrap v4 Responsive Navbars without jQuery
November 16, 2017 • JavaScript, BootstrapI’ve been using Bootstrap v4 in a project I am working on for a friend. He wants to be able to use the application on a mobile phone. Since…
Article Roundup - Week of Nov 5, 2017
November 10, 2017 • Article RoundupTen Extras for Great API Documentation
Good APIs and API documentation are hard. This article has suggestions for good API documentation…Change Your Mac's Lock Screen Image
November 08, 2017 • MacI worked at Interactive Intelligence before before it was acquired by Genesys and IT had put a custom lock screen image on all the Macs…
Article Roundup - Week of Oct 29, 2017
November 03, 2017 • Article RoundupImpress Your Friends With Code Splitting in React
Webpack can make code splitting very easy, and if you are building a React application…Article Roundup - Week of Oct 22, 2017
October 27, 2017 • Article RoundupChoosing between names and identifiers in URLs
Do you use permanent ids in URLs or do you use the name of something, even though it can…Article Roundup - Week of Oct 15, 2017
October 20, 2017 • Article RoundupReact, Inline Functions, and Performance
This is a good article to read if you have an interest in React, or if you care about application…Responsive Table With React and Bootstrap
October 14, 2017 • Bootstrap, ReactI’m currently working on an application for a friend to help him with his business. The application needs to be responsive since he may have…
Article Roundup - Week of Oct 8, 2017
October 13, 2017 • Article RoundupScaling the GitLab database
GitLab makes use of PostgreSQL and started out with a single database server plus replica. They outgrew that…Article Roundup - Week of Oct. 1st, 2017
October 06, 2017 • Article RoundupThe Ten Essentials for Good API Documentation
Good API documentation is something that sounds easy in theory, but is actually difficult. How…Article Roundup - Week of Sept. 24, 2017
September 29, 2017 • Article RoundupOn-Demand Environments With Docker and AWS ECS
This is a long article, but it is a step-by-step set of instructions on how to get a docker…Article Roundup - Week of Sept 17th 2017
September 22, 2017 • Article RoundupPartitioning Behavior of DynamoDB
This is part 3 of a 3 part series about DynamoDB. This article dives into how Dynamo handles creating…Article Roundup - Week of Sept. 10th 2017
September 15, 2017 • Article RoundupMaking the Google Developers Documentation Style Guide Public
Google has made their style guide for documentation public. While it may not…Article Roundup - Week of 9/3/17
September 08, 2017 •Accessibility Testing with pa11y
Accessibility testing can be a painful process, and it is easy to miss things. Pa11y is an accessibility…Article Roundup - Week of 8/27/17
September 01, 2017 • Article RoundupUnderstanding Failure Modes in Message and Event-based Systems
Error handling is exactly a fun topic, but dealing with errors and failure…Knockout Observables & Maps
August 29, 2017 • Knockout.jsI’ve used Knockout.js quite a bit, I was looking at some code and come across an interesting situation. I saw a JS Map object being put into…
Article Roundup - Week of 8/20/17
August 25, 2017 • Article RoundupAPIs as infrastructure: future-proofing Stripe with versioning
Stripe’s main product is payment processing, something you can’t afford to…cloud-init User Data Include File Format
August 24, 2017 • AWS, CloudI ran into something today with cloud-init that lead to a bit of a deep dive and I thought I’d share what I found.
One of the formats you can use for User Data is the include file format. It allows you to list our URLs or file paths. cloud-init will access the file or URL and execute it as a script. It’s great if there is a publicly accessible script you want to run. I’ve also seen cases…
Article Roundup - Week of 8/13/17
August 18, 2017 • Article RoundupChoosing the Right Features with Kano Model
The Kano Model is a tool that helps prioritize features based on how users perceive the feature…Article Roundup - Week of 08/06/17
August 11, 2017 • Article RoundupBuilding A Simple AI Chatbot With Web Speech API And Node.js
New services are popping up all the time, especially around AI. This article…Weekly Article Roundup - 7/30/2017
August 04, 2017 • Article RoundupThis was a bit of a light week in regards to articles I found, but here is what I have.
The United States of Developers
HackerRank, a…Article Roundup - Week of 7/23/2017
July 28, 2017 • Article RoundupURLs are UI
The URLs for pages on your site actually do matter. It’s something small, but it can make a big difference. Keep them short, and…Article Roundup - Week of 07/16/2017
July 21, 2017 •GPU.js
Browsers have been pushing boundaries for a while. This libraries uses some more recent advances to allow you to offload expensive JS…Article Roundup - Week of 7/9/2017
July 14, 2017 • Article RoundupMySQL Infrastructure Testing Automation at GitHub
GitHub’s MySQL databases are critical to the functioning of their site and service. Every…Article Roundup - Week of 7/3/2017
July 07, 2017 • Article RoundupWhat I’ve Learned Over 5 Years as a Software Developer
This is a nice article going over some lessons the author has learned thus far in …Article Roundup - Week of 6/26/2017
June 30, 2017 • Article RoundupCSS vs. JavaScript: Trust vs. Control
JavaScript can do what CSS does, but it generally doesn’t need to anymore. Before there was good…Article Roundup - Week of 6/19/2017
June 23, 2017 • Article RoundupDocumenting Architecture Decisions
Have you ever joined a new team or begun working on a new project only to have no idea why things were…Article Roundup - Week of 6/16/2017
June 16, 2017 • Article RoundupSpellbook of Modern Web Dev
This is an amazing collection of links with resources for both frontend and backend web development. It has…Article Roundup - Week of 6/05/2017
June 09, 2017 • Article RoundupHacker, Hack Thyself
You hear a lot about security breaches in the news, and as a developer you should hope that your product is never…Article Roundup - Week of 5/29/2017
June 02, 2017 • Article RoundupGitHub’s CSP journey
If you’re interested in web application security this is a good read. The article come out a while back but it…Article Roundup - Week of 5/22/2017
May 26, 2017 • Article RoundupMavo
I don’t know that Mavo is going to take off, but it is interesting. It lets you create web applications with just HTML. No JavaScript…Article Roundup - Week of 05/15/2017
May 19, 2017 • Article RoundupDesign Better Data Tables
There are small features that can be added to tables of data that make them far easier to use. This article…BigCommerce API Oddities & Concerns
May 14, 2017 • BigCommerce, APII’ve been working on a project for a friend, making him a tool to help him manage his BigCommerce store. I had previously made the tool for…
Article Roundup - Week of 5/08/2017
May 12, 2017 • Article RoundupA11Y Style Guide
Accessibility isn’t very fun, but it is a necessary task when designing a site. This is a beautiful style guide showing…Article Roundup - Week of 05/01/2017
May 05, 2017 • Article RoundupUpgrade your SSH keys!
Security recommendations are always changing, and I bet you probably have an older SSH key that is needs improving…Article Roundup - Week of 04/24/2017
April 28, 2017 • Article RoundupUnderstanding Stacked Bar Charts: The Worst Or The Best?
This article is a response to this article by a Research Scientist at Tableau that…Article Roundup - Week of 4/17/2017
April 21, 2017 • Article RoundupClient-side DSP library utilizing the power of WebAssembly
The repo has a link to a video editor the author made to show the library being…It's Been A While
April 20, 2017 •Article Roundup - Week of 4/10/2017
Tippy.js
Decent looking tooltips in JS are a pain. And when you find them then have heavy libraries as a…BT Sync & AWS
March 12, 2015 • AWS, BT SyncBitTorrent Sync (BT Sync) is a tool that can be used to synchronize files between devices using peer-to-peer (P2P), technology. Using this…
C# Memory Leaks
January 19, 2015 • c-sharpFor the past three or four work days I have been trying to find a memory leak in a Windows Service we created that is used to synchronize…
ServiceNow - Workflow E-Mails
October 29, 2014 • ServiceNowSending an e-mail from a workflow is ServiceNow is very easy. It barely takes any work. What happens when you need to include Request Item…
ServiceNow Record Producer Caveats
September 25, 2014 • ServiceNowI recently ran into a problem when using Record Producers. In the script for the Record Producer I am using the
applyTemplate
function on thecurrent
…GORUCK Light
May 24, 2014 •Disclaimer: This post will have absolutely nothing to do with programming
Last month I took part in an event called GORUCK Light. The company that puts these events on is called GORUCK. They make amazing rucksacks and other gear. Don’t be surprised when you see the prices. They aren’t cheap, but that is because they are well made and made in the USA. The company was founded in 200…
ServiceNow - Navigation Handlers
February 01, 2014 • ServiceNowIf you’re working in ServiceNow, depending upon where what you need to do you may run into objects ServiceNow gives you access to but doesn…
ServiceNow - Passing Data
October 25, 2013 • ServiceNowAt work we came across an interesting issue when dealing with ServiceNow this week. We are working on implimenting Incident and needed to be…
I Got Mentioned
September 10, 2013 •Last week a newletter went out that I had never heard of. It is called “Hacks && Happenings” and it is put out by a group called Indy…
Importance vs. Urgency
August 23, 2013 •A little while back my boss introduced me to the Importance vs. Urgency Matrix. It was a nice concept and I saw the reasoning behind it, but…
Etsy Deployinator Environments
July 31, 2013 • RubyEtsy open-sourced their deployment tool a while back, but I didn’t learn about it until more recently. It is called Deployinator and runs on…
New Site with Jekyll
July 24, 2013 • JekyllThe old version of my site was powered by laravel, and for what I used it for that was over-kill. I have tried out Octopress in the past and…
Service Now
June 21, 2013 • ServiceNowI recently switched jobs, and at the new company my department makes use of Service Now. I must say, I am impressed with the product. It is…
Foundation Instead Of Bootstrap?
May 14, 2013 • Bootstrap, Design, FoundationThere seem to be an increasing number of people throwing rants about overuse of Twitter Bootstrap. This is not one of them, I like Twitter…
Bootstrap Lightbox Update
May 03, 2013 • JavaScript, BootstrapI took a bit of a break from working on Bootstrap Lightbox. I just needed to get away and be lazy for a while, but I am back. The other week…
Ruby on Rails Exceptions
April 12, 2013 • Ruby, Ruby on Rails- Services
- Statuses
- Events
An event references both a service and a status. I needed to be able to ensure a status being deleted wasn’t…