VueJS and GraphQL with Apollo

This blog post demonstrates how to tie together Vue.js and GraphQL using the Apollo Client.  This is not something that I’ve tried yet, but it’s on the horizon.

If you have any other handy links for either Vue.js or GraphQL, please throw them my way.

Plugins spring cleaning

I’ve done a little spring cleaning of some plugins installed and activated on this site.  You shouldn’t notice much of a difference, except, maybe, fewer quirks and issues.  Here are some of the plugins that were removed:

  • Smart YouTube Pro – it was only used in a couple of posts for easier embedding of YouTube playlists.  Since I installed and used this plugin, WordPress got much better at embedding videos, so I don’t need it anymore.
  • Smart 404 – I think I used it with one of the previous themes on this site, but I can’t even remember last time I saw it working.  The 404 page of the current theme features a search form, which I think is good enough.
  • PayPal Donations – this was an experiment I tried ages and ages ago.  No need for this at all for quite some time now.
  • Related Posts By Tags – I used this with one of the previous themes, but it’s been ages since, and I think even the plugin is discontinued now.
  • Social – the plugin has been discontinued and the functionality was moved to JetPack.  I had this one disabled for quite some time now.
  • WP-Polls – this was yet another experiment I tried years ago.  There were a few polls with a few votes, which prevented me from removing this plugin.  But today I thought I’d do a compromise.  I replaced all polls with the screenshot of voting results for the purposes of data preservation. :)  Now I don’t need the plugin anymore and it’s gone.

That’s 6 plugins fewer – not bad.  Especially considering that some of them were quite heavy on the rendering side of things, and they were inserting useless CSS and JavaScript assets into every page of this site.  I think I should do it more often.

How we designed our Kubernetes infrastructure on AWS

“How we designed our Kubernetes infrastructure on AWS” is a case study of how Atlassian (the kind people behind BitBucket, HipChat, Jira, and a few other popular tools) setup their infrastructure on Amazon AWS.

With all the popularity of the cloud in general and AWS in particular, there is still not enough articles like this one.

Botwiki – an open catalog of friendly, useful, artistic online bots

Botwiki is an impressive collection of bots for a variety of social networks and collaboration tools – Twitter, Slack, Tubmlr, Facebook and Messenger, YouTube, Reddit, Telegram, Snapchat, and more.  You can browse all these by network or by category.

Here’s a random Twitter bot for you:

@holidaybot4000 is a Twitter bot that tweets holidays around the world for the given day, typically together with an image of the country’s flag.

50 Things You [Probably] Forgot To Design

“50 Things You [Probably] Forgot To Design” is a collection of all those tiny (and not so tiny) details that are often left out during the design process for a website, web application, or mobile app.  It covers a variety of bits from favicons to login forms, splash screens, pagination, and welcome emails.

If you only it was available now as a checklist …