Building Better Data Visualization Experiences: Part 2 of 2

As early as 2006, Clive Humby, a renowned British mathematician and marketing genius, declared, “Data is the new oil.” Business intelligence (BI) and data visualization are still ever-growing concerns. Data went from being scarce, expensive, and difficult ... more

Rockstar Development

This originally appeared on Marty Henderson’s personal blog Or, how to use Gitpod and GitLab so that no one else has to care about your questionable coding language choices. A true rockstar has a good developer experience! Example Repo For the impatient ... more

Gitpod and Hringvegurinn

Iceland Ever seen an advertisement for visiting Iceland? Have you noticed that they all mention Hrinvegurinn or the Ring Road, as a good tour? (If you haven’t seen a tour ad for Iceland, Steindi Jr does an excellent job in The Hardest Karaoke Song in ... more

JavaScript Bundle Optimization – Polyfills

If you are lucky enough to only support a small subset of browsers (for example, you are targeting a controlled set of users), feel free to move along. However, if your website is open to the broader internet, you are likely dealing with polyfills in ... more

Video capture using WebRTC

Capturing the feed of a users camera can be a daunting undertaking involving one or multiple third party packages. Often we opt for prompting the user to upload the video or image we need, causing more steps for the user and a more difficult user experience. ... more

Waypoint and JVM

What are we doing here? We’re going to to run Waypoint to build a Clojure web application, deploy it, and release it on a URL. Along the way, we’re going to see how it interacts with a DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster and a Harbor image registry. Waypoint ... more

New Year’s Resolution: Spotless Code

As your team enters the new year fresh off of a “holiday reboot”, broaden your next retrospective to look at the previous year as a whole. What went well? Where did things fall short? What will you change in the upcoming year? Now is the time to set ... more

Refreshing AWS Access Token with Amplify and Axios

Authentication is one of those foundational pieces of your application that can be complex if your requirements don’t fit some predetermined mold. For that reason, I am aiming to provide you a quick and easy way to refresh an AWS access token via the ... more

Deploying Azure Functions with Tekton CI/CD

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems and a part of the new Continuous Delivery Foundation. While still in early stages, there is significant investment in the project due to its ability to integrate natively with ... more

Using Directives in Scaled Apollo GraphQL

A bit ago I wrote about scaling an Apollo GraphQL Server using schema federation. Read that here. Directives are basically annotations that can be added to any line of a schema, which start up some processing that should be done related to that line. ... more

Up and Running with AWS Glue

AWS Glue is a managed service that can really help simplify ETL work. In this blog I’m going to cover creating a crawler, creating an ETL job, and setting up a development endpoint. Since Glue is managed you will likely spend the majority of your time ... more

JavaScript Modules: A Brief History

In this article, you will learn about the history of modules in JavaScript, what is possible today, and how to use JavaScript modules in your own applications. Before modules JavaScript was designed for use in a web browser. In order to use JavaScript, ... more

Continuous Deployment with JHipster and GitLab

So, you want to get started with Continuous Deployment. Maybe you’re creating a new project, and you want to implement a modern approach to the SDLC. Or perhaps you want to simplify and accelerate the deployment process of an existing application. Or ... more

Distributed Tracing with Apache Kafka and Jaeger

If you are using Apache Kafka, you are almost certainly dealing with many applications that need to work together to accomplish some big picture goal. In other words, you are working within a distributed system. And because Kafka decouples consumers ... more

Translate Create React App with React-Intl

The React ecosystem is good at many things, including being able to quickly spin-up a solid dev stack with Create React App. CRA provides a great core set of features (webpack, build scripts, jest tests, etc…) and solid documentation to easily create ... more

Getting started with machine learning

Machine and deep learning are very popular topics which have a very wide range of use cases. I’m not going to spend too much time explaining what machine learning is, instead I’m going to assume you already know that part. However, just in case, here ... more

A Useful Tip or Two, Part 1

Introduction I’ve lately had the opportunity to do a lot of teaching to some up and coming DevOps personnel. I take a lot of pride in teaching because good talent, as we all know too well, is hard to find. Helping a person find their inner engineer can ... more

Open Source InfoSec Using Gradle

Information security needs to be a part of any application. Solutions range in price from no cost to very expensive. However, quality is usually proportional to cost (but not always). We are going to look at no cost solutions that integrate with the ... more

Migrate from react-loadable to React.Suspense

React apps using code splitting often use the excellent react-loadable library which handles detecting whether a code segment has been loaded and, if not, putting up a spinner or other “wait” indicator while that code is asynchronously fetched from the ... more

AWS Lambda configuration scheme

Building servlerless applications with AWS lambda and not sure how to setup your configuration per environment? Here’s an approach that keeps things neat and tidy, yet allows for secure configuration values as well. For the example we’ll be using the ... more

A Quick Tour of Joda Beans

One of my big headaches about Java is the amount of boilerplate code you need to put in to make things work right. Especially in POJOs. I mean, is the solution to always run “generate getters/setters” in the IDE? And how about an equals and hashCode ... more

The Whats and Whys of WCAG 2.1

Recently the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) was approved and released, adding several new guidelines for developers to follow when making sure their website is as accessible as possible. Some of these new guidelines ... more

GraphQL: Most of the Parts

Hello! My name is Dustin Schau and I hope to share some knowledge with you about… you guessed it, GraphQL! I intend for this to be a gentle introduction to foundational concepts of GraphQL. In illustrating these concepts, we gain a greater understanding ... more

Logical GWT client testing with Spock

GWT – Google Web Toolkit may not be as heavily used as it once was 5-10 years ago, though many enterprise teams and legacy projects are still using the technology. While we can easily use Spock to test our other Java and Groovy projects, and even to ... more

Exploring a Host-Only Network

What’s a Host-Only Network? Often, the first subject I tackle when architecting new services is that of the Host-Only Network. The pattern I outline here is used as a foundation for all my POC work. I usually design products to run on multiple hosts, ... more

Experiencing Hour of Code

A few years ago I signed up to volunteer for a local Hour of Code event on the Code.org website. It took a few years, but I was asked to take part in an event this year at a local elementary school. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but took the opportunity ... more

Build your svg on the server using Swagger, Node, Express

Recently, I had the need to share an svg chart between a javascript (React) app, an android app, and an iOS app. One option would be to write code in all three application to generate the chart, but a better option is to push the generation of the chart ... more

Taming Redux with Sagas

Redux by itself is pretty cut-and-dried: write some action creators, write some reducers, dispatch actions. Where it gets complicated is when you have to integrate that concept into a natural workflow where they can branch off and fork based on user ... more

CSS in JS: Benefits, Drawbacks, and Tooling

I’m a frontend developer specializing in all things JavaScript. Throughout my career, I’ve done a fair bit of everything: Angular, React, jQuery, you name it. Of course, I’ve also done a fair bit of everything in CSS land, whether it’s vanilla CSS, LESS, ... more

GraphQL in Spring Boot (Take Two)

When I wrote “Implement a GraphQL Endpoint in a Groovy App” this past July, I had yet to actually use GraphQL anywhere other than a pet project. Well, that has changed and so have my techniques and opinions on using Spring Boot as a GraphQL server. I’m ... more