Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

Dgraph – fast, transactional, distributed graph database

Dgraph is a fast, transactional distributed graph database, written in Go. It’s Open Source too.

If you need a quick introduction to graph databases or if you are wondering whether you need to use one, here’s a good video to get you started.

For even more insight, read “Why Google Needed a Graph Serving System“. There are some interesting examples of problems, solutions, and data discovery. For example:

Cerebro would often reveal very interesting facts that one didn’t originally search for. When you’d run a query like [us presidents], Cerebro would understand that presidents are humans, and humans have height. Therefore, it would allow you to sort presidents by height and show that Abraham Lincoln is the tallest US president. It would also let people be filtered by nationality. In this case, it showed America and Britain in the list, because US had one British president, namely George Washington. (Disclaimer: Results based on the state of KG at the time; can’t vouch for the correctness of these results.)

Intro to basic web application security

“Intro to basic web application security” is an excellent overview of the most common mistakes web developers make when it comes to security. The article provides practical examples (including code snippets and screenshots), which illustrate the problems and ways to solve them. The list includes:

  • SQL injection (of course! no such guide would be complete without it)
  • Cross-site scripting (XSS)
  • Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF)
  • Local file inclusion (LFI)
  • Insufficient password hashing
  • Man in the middle (MITM)
  • Command injection
  • XML external entity (XXE)
  • Sensitive data exposure (including error messages and exceptions)
  • Login rate limits
  • and a variety of other, small, but potentially dangerous issues.

Refactoring.Guru : Design Patterns + PHP

Refactoring.Guru is a great resource for learning about refactoring best practices and design patterns. A lot of the website’s content is also available as Dive into Design Patterns ebook.

Today I came across this GitHub repository, which makes this resource even better specifically for PHP developers. Yup, that’s right, the GitHub repository features all code examples written in PHP 7.3, making it super easy to jump into coding.

And if you aren’t a PHP developer, have a look at the other repositories, which do the same for a few other programming languages.

How To Build a Serverless CI/CD Pipeline On AWS

“How To Build a Serverless CI/CD Pipeline On AWS” is a nice guide to some of the newer Amazon AWS services, targeted at developers and DevOps. It shows how to tie together the following:

  • Amazon EC2 (server instances)
  • Docker (containers)
  • Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry)
  • Amazon S3 (storage)
  • Amazon IAM (Identity and Access Management)
  • Amazon CodeBuild (Continuous Integration)
  • Amazon CodePipeline (Continuous Delivery)
  • Amazon CloudWatch (monitoring)
  • Amazon CloudTail (logs)

The examples in the article are for setting up the CI/CD pipeline for .NET, but they are easily adoptable for other development stacks.

Introduction to Microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes

There is plenty of documentation, tutorials, and guides online, explaining Docker containers, Kubernetes container orchestration, and microservices. Here are a few that I found useful for the quick and simple introduction into these technologies and how to tie them together.

Firstly, some basic 101s:

Secondly, “Introduction to Microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes” YouTube video nicely puts all the things together, with complete code and configuration examples, some glue, and extra tips.

And finally, a few bits that you might need to solve on the way, which are not necessarily related, but can throw you off:

  • Some of the virtualization bits (such as VirtualBox) might fail to run properly if you have Secure Boot enabled. To solve this problem, reboot the machine, go to the BIOS, and disable Secure Boot (enable Legacy Mode).
  • Additionally, while you are there, check for the Virtualization Technology settings. Enable Virtualization Technology in the BIOS to further smooth out VirtualBox and friends.
  • While working on your first minikube cluster (sorting out VirtualBox and such), it helps to completely remove and start again, after sorting out any issues that prevent Kubernetes to start (proxy timeouts, etc). A quick “minikube delete && minikube start” will save you some time on troubleshooting weird issues, than just “minikube start” after a failure.

Have fun!