Technology

After a year of using NodeJS in production

There are days, when I feel jealous of all the young kids playing around with new technologies. I need a certain level of stability and acceptance of the technology before I can apply it to client projects. And I need time, which is a very scarce resource lately.

And yet there are days, when I feel good about being somewhat reserved and conservative in my technology stack choices. Reading this blog post makes me feel just that. Of course I need to try it out for myself and shape my own opinion, but with my lack of time, this should do.

I spent a year trying to make Javascript and more specifically Node work for our team. Unfortunately during that time we spent more hours chasing docs, coming up with standards, arguing about libraries and debugging trivial code more than anything.

Would I recommend it for large-scale products? Absolutely not. Do people do that anyway? Of course they do. I tried to.

I would however recommend Javascript for front-end development such as Angular or React (like you have another choice).

I would also recommend Node for simple back-end servers mainly used for websockets or API relay.

Now if only somebody wrote a similar post about Docker …

Wikiwand – Wikipedia Modernized

I came across an interesting take on Wikipedia – Wikiwand. It’s basically an upgraded and modernized design of the Wikipedia. You can either search and browse it like you do with the regular Wikipedia, or, better even, install a browser extension (here’s one for Google Chrome), which will redirect all your Wikipedia page clicks through to Wikiwand. You get exactly the same content, but now it’s actually quite pleasant to explore. Have a look at Cyprus page, for example:

I’m not a frequent Wikipedia reader, but in the last couple of days, I have to say, I’ve found myself spending much more time than usual reading Wikipedia pages on the Wikiwand website. Maybe, it is time for the Wikipedia face lift after all.

But it’s not just about forcing a different web design upon thee. There’s more. You get options (upper-right corner). You can switch between light and dark designs, sans and serif fonts, adjust font size and text justification, and more. If you create account and login (Facebook is supported), you can bookmark pages too.

Even if you are not a fan of fancy websites, I suggest you give it a try for a couple of days. You might find yourself quite surprised.

The Slashdot Interview With Larry Wall

Slashdot runs the interview with Larry Wall, the creator of Perl programming language. There is a wide variety of questions. Some are technical – about Perl 6, comparison to other programming languages (Python, PHP), Perl in the browser, etc. Some are more generic – what kind of tools Larry uses, and what are his thoughts on English being lingua franca of the computer world. The answers are often funny, yet very insightful.

Test your backups!

You can read all the books in the world and know all there is to know, but if you don’t follow the wisdom and practice the knowledge, then it’s all useless. That’s my lesson from yesterday.

The Tao of Backup, which I linked to before, says:

So, what happened? Well, as I was preparing for the Fedora 24 installation, I wanted to backup some of my files, as the partition would be formatted. I’ve connected an external USB drive with plenty of space and ZIP-archived a few of the vital directories on to it.

That was a very simple backup procedure and I saw the resulting files on the volume. What else should I do, right? Wrong! I should have tested the restore. I didn’t.

Most of the directories that I backed up were small – /etc, /opt, /root. But my /home directory was about 20 GBs. The external USB disk used the FAT-32 file system, which has a 4 GB file size limit. So only the first 4 GBs of my /home folder were backed up. Funny enough, those files were mostly browser cache and image thumbnails – stuff that should be ignored from backups. The main two folders that I wanted – Desktop and .ssh were not part of the backup. And I only realized that after the partition has been formatted.

So, yeah, I should have tested the backup.

P.S.: Gladly, I do have backups elsewhere, and most of my work is committed to GitHub/BitBucket anyways.

Fedora 24 : the day of 64-bit has come

I’ve been using 64-bit Linux distributions on the servers for a while now, but was reluctant to put one on my laptop. I’ve tried a couple of times many years ago, and found that there were all sorts of weird issues.

Yesterday, with a little push from my brother, Google, and Slashdot, I’ve decided to give it another go. 64-bit Fedora 24 is now on my laptop and I am carefully exploring it. So far, so good.

I guess I won’t have to worry about Year 2038 Problem after all.