Intro

When I started the Software Engineering program at the Flatiron School I hadn’t had much experience with MacOS. Having used PCs and dabbling with *nixes since the 90s, I never felt compelled to try MacOS out. However, for the in-person program it was highly recommended (read: requirements) to use a MacBook. Luckily, at that time (now, discontinued) they had a leasing program and I borrowed a Macbook Air, and soon fell in 💖.

Everything worked together comparatively seamlessly, and I should have expected it. My transition from a Motorola phone with Android to the iPhone (at my wife’s behest) was…

In parts 1A and 1B I covered the Production environment used by Medium back in 2015, as detailed in this article. This week I’ll be looking into the data storage they were using.

The technologies in this section are:

• NoSQL databases (Amazon DynamoDB)
• SQL databases (Amazon RDS for Aurora)
• In-memory databases (Redis)
• Graph databases (Neo4J)

My first question is what are the advantages and disadvantages of each type of database? Why use multiple types of databases?

In one case, it looks like it’s done for speed (Redis in front of DynamoDB), in the other cases (Aurora and Neo4J), for the…

Last week, I explored the production environment of Medium.com, that D.P. documented in “The Stack That Helped Medium Drive 2.6 Millennia of Reading Time” (2015). The one part I left out was the ELK (Elastic, Logstash and Kibana) stack. The subject was much broader subject than expected and my post had already quite long. This week, I’ll finish off my learnings on the Production Environment with:

The Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash)

Dan’s article is a bit aged in terms of technology and 5 years can seem like ages. One recent change to the ELK stack is the addition of Beats. …

Introduction

Lately, I’ve started looking at the different tech stacks that organizations and companies work with. I’m not sure how recently the term tech stack was coined, but its a convenient term to encapsulate the technologies being used. It makes it easy to say a lot in a little time about an organization.

I can get a feel of how recently they started building, whether they are more technologically conservative or riding the cutting edge. …

The terminal, the shell, a console — all names for a command line interface (CLI) which we interact with through the keyboard. Compared to mouse, track-pad navigation, or nowadays, touch-responsive interaction, it might seem that interacting with the computer via keyboard is a step backward.

I feel its actually more of a side step. A choice, I would say, which offers both pros and cons.

Earlier in 2020, NYC underwent a city-wide lock-down to “flatten the curve”. A coordinated effort to prevent healthcare from being overwhelmed, inundated and possible collapse. …

This week I won’t bore you busy people with the history of the Internet, or regale you with tales of long by-gone relics of a time past. To do so would only invite the same glazed over looks I get from my friends’ tweenagers when I talk about cutting edge 90’s computer tech like floppy disks, industry-disrupting consumer products like the Sony Walkman and the great retail stores before the age of Amazon like Woolworth’s in downtown Flushing, NY.

Instead, I’ll share something even better. My personal experience and thoughts on a lesser-known remnant from the olden-times in the Internet…

What is a Linter?

Linters have a long history in software development. Stephen C. Johnson (writings) developed Lint while debugging Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), which was written in the C programming language at Bell Labs in 1978.

Much like the way a lint roller will go over your clothes, removing unwanted dust, hairs and other assorted undesirables (like legos), a software linter will go over and analyze your source code for possible errors, best practices and stylistic issues. Configuration options allow you to choose which bugs to identify, flag, and if desired, act on. …

Preface

Its been six months since I finished bootcamp and since then I’ve been brushing up on my Javascript skills. When I first launched from Flatiron, I was like a learning maniac. Every week I was looking at something new — this framework, that library, this kuberdocker and that AWZurify — and not really learning much of anything. It wasn’t until after falling short on my second technical interview that a startup co-founder suggested I focus on mastery of a language. It didn’t really matter which, it could really be ANY language, but absolutely master it. …