These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
ctop is a very simple, but very useful tool for when you run a number of Docker containers and want to have a top-like overview of their CPU, memory, and network usage.
This article provides more details on how to install, run, and use ctop effectively, including container filtering, single container view, etc.
k6 is a developer centric open source load and performance regression testing tool for testing the performance of your cloud native backend infrastructure: APIs, microservices, serverless, containers and websites. It’s built to integrate well into your development workflow and CI/CD automation pipelines.
This is one of the better tools that I’ve seen in a long time. Not only it does its job great, but it integrates brilliantly with your development and testing pipelines.
You can either build your tests from scratch, or you can convert import them from your existing tools. For example, Postman collections, environments, and tests can be converted to k6 with postman-to-k6. Here’s a blog post to get you started on that path.
Side note: if you hit the “EACCES: permission denied, mkdir ‘/usr/local/lib/node_modules/postman-to-k6/vendor’” durin the postman-to-k6 installation, then simply append “–unsafe-perm=true –allow-root” to the “npm install” command, as suggested in this GitHub thread.
k6 provides excellent functionality for extending your basic performance tests with additional checks, metrics, and thresholds. You can even keep using your existing Postman tests within k6.
There’s also a variety of output formats, ranging from CSV and JSON, all the way to InfluxDB with Grafana charts.
Postman is a great tool for building and testing APIs. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t come packaged as an RPM, so there’s some trickery involved in installing it on Fedora.
This blog post was very useful, with some minor corrections. Here’s what I had to do:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Postman
GenericName=API Client
X-GNOME-FullName=Postman API Client
Comment=Make and view REST API calls and responses
Keywords=api;
Exec=/usr/local/bin/postman
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/opt/Postman/app/resources/app/assets/icon.png
Categories=Development;Utilities;
Now you can run Postman both via the command line (postman) and from the Gnome/Mate menu. You’ll find it under Applications->Programming.
IMDb is widely known for two things: the overwhelming size of its movie database, and the fact that it never changes the way it looks.
Well, guess what, IMDb update its look and feel, and it’s not a minor change. It’s fast, it’s functional, and it no longer looks like it was built 20 years ago.
The funny thing is that while I was looking for a blog post announcing the changes, I came across this one from 2009. I haven’t realized that it was from 2009 until I saw the screenshots.
Some time ago the incredible happened: our beloved movie database site IMDb finally realized that it was not 1996 anymore and dared to hire some designers in order to – you won’t believe it – change the design of the page! When I visited the site the other day, I couldn’t believe my eyes
And just so that we keep the history, here are a couple of screenshots of how it used to look:
Great job IMDb! Even if it’ll take all of us a bit to get used to the new design. At least we know it’ll last another decade.
AWSume is a command line tool that makes switching between multiple Amazon AWS profiles really easy and simple.