AWS X-Ray – Analyze and debug production, distributed applications

 

I think I’m giving up on even knowing the list and purpose of all the Amazon AWS services, let alone how to use them.  Here’s one I haven’t heard about until this very morning: AWS X-Ray.

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator

Having knowledge of Linux is essential for any system administration, middleware, web engineer job.

Linux is used almost everywhere in production or a non-production environment. There are thousands of article, book, video training to explore and learn but that would be time-consuming.

Instead, you can follow one or two related books or online training.

The following learning materials cover a large number of Linux Administration tasks from beginning to expert level. So pick the one suits you.

Source: 16 Linux Books and Videos for System Administrator

Real Favicon Generator

Real Favicon Generator is a handy tool for setting up your website’s favicon properly.  It takes care of both the images (formats, resolutions, etc) and the HTML that you’ll need to include.  With just a few clicks your website will work properly with browsers, operating systems, and mobile applications.

With so many platforms and icons, it’s hard to know exactly what you should do. What are the dimensions of favicon.ico? How many Touch icons do I need? RealFaviconGenerator did the reseach and testing for you.

If you still prefer to do it yourself and know all there is to generating proper favicon images and markup, have a look at this resource for everything there is to it and more.

Spellbook of Modern Web Dev

Spellbook of Modern Web Dev is a collection of 2,000+ carefully selected links to resources on anything web development related.  It covers subjects from Internet history and basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, all the way to tools, libraries and advanced usage of web technologies, and more; from network protocols and browser compatibility to development environments, containers, and ChatOps.

  • This document originated from a bunch of most commonly used links and learning resources I sent to every new web developer on our full-stack web development team.
  • For each problem domain and each technology, I try my best to pick only one or a few links that are most important, typical, common or popular and not outdated, base on the clear trendspublic data and empirical observation.
  • Prefer fine-grained classifications and deep hierarchies over featureless descriptions and distractive comments.
  • Ideally, each line is a unique category. The ” / “ symbol between the links means they are replaceable. The “, “symbol between the links means they are complementary.
  • I wish this document could be closer to a kind of knowledge graph or skill tree than a list or a collection.
  • It currently contains 2000+ links (projects, tools, plugins, services, articles, books, sites, etc.)

On one hand, this is one of the best single resources on the topic of web development that I’ve seen in a very long time.  On the other hand, it re-confirms my belief in “there is no such thing as a full-stack web developer”.  There’s just too many levels, and there’s too much depth to each level for a single individual to be an expert at.  But you get bonus points for trying.

formapro/pvm – PHP library for building workflows and business processes

formapro/pvm is a PHP library for building workflows and business processes.  This is a nice addition to alternatives that I’ve looked at in “Getting started with workflows in PHP“.  The library is brought to you by Forma Pro, the same guys who are behind the php-enqueue enterprise queuing solution in PHP.