Feature Friday: AWS S3 backends, smarter images, and Squarespace support

TGIF! We recently released Fly’s open source CDN. It’s a powerful CDN built specifically for developers. Written in TypeScript, it's an edge application that routes requests to different backends and enhances them with middleware. You can use it right ... more

Easy Geo-Targeting with an Edge App

Geo-targeting enables web applications to use visitors’ geographical location (country or city based on IP) to serve tailored content. IP addresses can be found using a number of methods; one of which will be implemented in some example apps below. Once ... more

Happy Thanksgiving 2018!

With the holidays approaching and 2018 quickly coming to an end, we're eager to relax and reflect on the year that was. For everyone in our community who has helped us grow Fly and put your trust in us to deliver super-duper fast applications and festive ... more

How to version a web API

API design is a spicy topic! Many a wise word 1, 2, 3, 4 has been written about the best way to structure and version an API. In this article, we'll take a dip into the conflicting schools of API-design, establish a pragmatic middle-ground, and demonstrate ... more

Lighthouse performance score guide

Lighthouse (by Google) is a fun and easy tool used to test web app performance. It’s so easy in fact that all you do is click a button, and within seconds a magic number between 0 and 100 is generated for you. This magic number basically tells you how ... more

How to effectively handle downtime with caching

There are simply too many things that can cause unwanted website downtime, from network failures to software bugs to server overload and maintenance to data center problems and power outages, the eerie list goes on. If you own a website or app, you know ... more

Superfly Apps: Realtime chat app with Fanout + Fly

In my latest installment of Superfly Apps, I get to share a quick and easy realtime chat app by our friends at Fanout, a cloud service that makes it easy to build and scale realtime/evented APIs. I talked to Justin, the CEO and founder at Fanout, who ... more

Fly cache API: now with tags + global deletes + extra sauce

Fly's caching API reads from and writes to regional, in memory cache servers. The most recent Fly release includes two big cache features — so you can solve one of the two hard problems in computer science: Cache invalidation Naming things Off by one ... more

Fetch at the Edge

We all remember the cringeworthy XMLHttpRequest we used back in the day to make requests, interact with servers, and retrieve data from URL’s, right? As I recall, it involved some pretty messy code, it didn't give us promises and let's be honest, it ... more

How to optimize your WordPress blog without plugins

From Mercedes-Benz, TechCrunch and Sony Music to The Rolling Stones and Katy Perry, people all over the web are using WordPress to publish beautiful websites, blogs and apps. The appeal comes from the freedom to really create anything you want. With ... more

How to add responsive images to Ghost

Ghost is a powerful blogging platform written in JavaScript, designed to simplify the process of creating online blogs and publications. Users love it because it offers a slick markdown-based editing environment, super simple content management/scheduling ... more

Take off with Fly’s App generator

If you’re one of the many curious individuals interested in building an app with Fly’s unique, powerful features but need a little kick-start, then this article is for you. Whether you’re a brand-new developer or a seasoned, multilingual web-genius, ... more

Podcast roundup: Summer 2018

We've been busy bees here at Fly! In case you missed it, we released Fly v0.38.1 with some cool new features like improved logging and custom timeouts on fetch . We've also been getting out on the podcast and meetup circuit and have had a blast getting ... more

One hostname to rule them all

One Hostname to rule them all, One Hostname to find them, One Hostname to bring them all, And in your funnel bind them. Search-Engine Optimization is vital for a healthy flow of organic traffic to arrive at your pages. How you describe, label, host, ... more

Fly + Glitch: Easily implement a custom hostname on Glitch

Imagine ... coders of all skill levels, writing and iterating upon a sea of applications, together. Consider the possibilities! The beautiful things we could build when we work together and truly experience the joy of building. And so, Glitch was born. ... more

Feature Friday: app generator, better logging, and one other thing

Happy Friday! We just released Fly version 0.38.1 . Have a look at the changelog (diff), or just install it now: npm i -g @fly/fly . Then give us a star on GitHub – did you know developers feed on stars? App generator This release introduces a CLI command ... more

Lighthouse: how to reduce render-blocking scripts

This article is part 4 of Fly's Google Lighthouse Series , which is a series aimed at helping you achieve better Lighthouse scores through solutions to each Lighthouse audit recommendation. The preceding articles in this series talk about what a Lighthouse ... more

Lighthouse: improve performance scores by properly sizing images

This article is part 3 of Fly's Google Lighthouse Series , which is a series aimed at helping you achieve better Lighthouse scores through solutions to each Lighthouse audit recommendation. The preceding articles in this series talk about what a Lighthouse ... more

Adding another layer to the stack

Web developers have historically sworn allegiance to two layers of the web stack - frontend or backend. Some even choose both layers, and call themselves fullstack developers. In a typical web application, your backend makes logical decisions on your ... more

Lighthouse: lazy-loading offscreen and hidden images

This article is part 2 of Fly's Google Lighthouse Series , which is a series aimed at helping you achieve better lighthouse scores through solutions to each Lighthouse audit recommendation. The series starts here, enjoy! We'll be continuing our Google ... more

Google Lighthouse series part one: improve scores with next-gen image optimization

What is Google Lighthouse and why should you care? If you live and breathe web performance, chances are you’ve already heard about the wizardry that is "Google Lighthouse" . If not, by the end of this article you’ll understand why it’s an absolutely ... more

Edit images on the Fly with URL parameters

Think you've got a handle on how to serve images for your app or website? Think again! Fly makes serving images a breeze, and gives you the power and flexibility to edit and modify images before they're even sent to your client. Oh, and by the way, they're ... more

JavaScript Templating with Fly ... Mad Libs Style

Today we see the vast majority of websites and apps using JavaScript to create lively, dynamic interfaces. While DOM manipulation is great for some JavaScript apps, what about the apps that constantly need large parts of the document updated every time ... more

The Power of Caching with Fly

It's no secret that we've collectivity become a society where the word patience in no longer in our vocabulary. We get frustrated by buffering videos and pages that pop together as images slowly load. Let's be honest, we hate waiting. And why should ... more

Fly + Heroku: Connect any Heroku App to Fly

Heroku, meet Fly. Fly, meet Heroku. Heroku is a hosting platform that lets you build, deliver, monitor and scale apps... basically a cloud container to run your code from. Whereas Fly is a programmable CDN that makes your applications fast and gives ... more

Getting Started with Fly

Thinking about taking Fly for a spin but not quite sure how to navigate? Let me take the wheel and steer you through some of the winding roads and scenic highways that make up the Fly universe. By the end of this article you'll be sitting in the driver's ... more

Remove render bottlenecks with Fly

Deep in the nethers of internetland, there's an e-commerce site that takes 22 seconds to load. The products are great, but nobody's gonna wait. There's lots of quality new traffic, but the bounce rate is astronomic. Every premature bounce is wasted marketing. ... more

Introducing Fly Edge Apps

We've just released Fly Edge Apps! tldr; Build edge applications written in JavaScript. Develop locally ( npm install -g @fly/fly ), write tests ( fly test ), deploy your code globally ( fly deploy ). The runtime is Open Source, and we have docs to get ... more

Fly Edge Apps: Reporting Exceptions

When an exception happens in production, you want to know right away and you want to know what exactly happened. Sure, you can look at your logs, but there are a ton of exception reporting services out there. This post explains how to use Sentry with ... more

Fly Edge Apps: Advanced HTTP Routing

Have you ever wanted to serve bunch of different apps on the same hostname? We have, and earned VCL / HAProxy / nginx / mod_rewrite scars to show for it. It's a simple idea that's excruciating to implement. Fly Edge Apps make sophisticated routing as ... more