Implementing great forms can be a real time-waster. With just a few lines of JSON, you can use MSON to generate forms that perform real-time validation and have a consistent layout. And, MSON comes with a bunch of cool stuff like date pickers, masked fields and field collections.

Disclaimer: this post is geared towards those wishing to use Material-UI with React. Future versions of MSON will support other rendering layers.

What the heck is MSON?

MSON is a declarative language that has the capabilities of an object-oriented language. The MSON compiler allows you to generate apps from JSON. The ultimate goal of MSON is to…

I’ve spent the last 7 months working on a new programming language called MSON (pronounced Mason). Here is a nerdy post about why I did it, how it works and where I want to take it.

There are already a bazillion programming languages, why do we need another?

Software continues to eat the world and software development tools are evolving at lightning speeds, but it stills takes an in-depth knowledge of a programming language to develop software. Sure, there are millions of open-source projects that can be mashed together and robust cloud platforms that make the process easier, but it takes considerable skill to get all of these technologies working together. When I envision the future, I imagine the average person being able to make software, just like how the average person can create a spreadsheet today.

Creating a spreadsheet has become commonplace and this is largely a…

In Scalable CouchDB Replication and Change Listening with Spiegel, I summarized how you can use Spiegel to scale your replication and change listening. Be sure to read that introduction before exploring this follow-up article.

In this post we are going to use a basic example to step through how you would actually use Spiegel. This tutorial assumes that you have some familiarity with CouchDB and it will only focus on the replication and change-listening elements of these examples.

Example: A Blogging App

Consider an example where we have users posting blog entries. Let’s assume that we want to use PouchDB to sync data between…

Editor’s Note: This article on Spiegel is intended for those who already have some familiarity with Apache CouchDB™, a JSON database known for its excellent offline sync capabilities. To learn more about CouchDB and Offline First, check out Geoff’s previous article on CouchDB, PouchDB, and Hoodie as a Stack for Progressive Web Apps.

Spiegel was originally designed to provide scalable replication and change listening for Quizster, a photo-based feedback and submission system. Spiegel is now an open source project available to everyone.

So, why do we need Spiegel? The short answer is that without it, you’ll have a hard time…

I recently had the privilege to attend Offline Camp, a 4-day retreat that brings together a select group of people to discuss offline-first development and design. One of the unconference sessions I participated in was CouchDB, PouchDB and Hoodie as a Stack for Progressive Web Apps. In this session a small but passionate group of us took turns sharing our views on this offline stack and asking questions like, why isn’t this stack more popular? The following is a write-up of what we discussed with my added two cents.

Let’s start with some background. An offline-first design enables an app…

Imagine that you’ve got your new shiny CouchDB cluster working in production and then a node goes down. If your design is solid and you have enough CouchDB nodes still left running, your app should keep chugging along. You on the other hand, will want to know why a node went down so that you can determine whether you need to tweak things like the memory or CPU on your nodes. You may also want to receive notifications via email or slack so that you can diagnosis things in real-time.

Prometheus is an open source monitoring system that allows you…

AWS has an awesome firewall built into its core services which can easily be used to make sure that only certain ports are open to the outside world. One extra step that we can take is to run a VPN Server that serves as the gateway to our protected EC2 instances. We can then shutdown direct SSH access to our EC2 instances and also have the freedom to block access to our entire network just by revoking access via our VPN Server. The later is very useful if you need to revoke access for a former employee.

The following tutorial…

Things are heating up in the CouchDB universe now that CouchDB 2 is an out-of-the-box multi-master database that can scale to store a lot of data!

Unfortunately, there is still a bit of a shortage in documentation when it comes to how to use CouchDB 2 in production. The point of this tutorial is to take you step by step through the process of setting up a CouchDB cluster in production using AWS and Docker. We’ve used a similar setup for Quizster, a digital dropbox and grading system, and it is working great!

The setup below uses open source software…