Docker has changed the way how we deploy our applications, and there is a chance that even if you are not using Docker directly, it is being used by your cloud provider to deliver your application. For example Google Cloud Functions and Firebase functions are powered by Docker, and even if you are just using simple Node.js app deployed to FIrebase, it is running in Docker container anyway!

But there is not that match of a developers using Docker as a main driver for development environment, because it can be quite complicated to get started with it as a dev environment setup. …

The current software development ecosystem moves fast and seems older frameworks like Django or Rails becoming absolute, but it is a huge underestimate! Django is one of the unique frameworks that I like to use first of all because it contains everything in it, with just a few simple configurations.

Let’s say you want to build a simple admin panel based on an existing DB and already predefined models. Even if project written in Node.js …

Blogging became one of the industries for making money on the internet, and content marketing became a thing overall. The overall market is focused on producing as match content as possible because first of all Google Crawler is kind for blogs with large amounts of unique updated contents, secondly, users will be more engaged when there are daily or weekly systematic updates.

That all said, now reading experience for blogs is way more important than previously, because users coming and spending more than 3–5 minutes on average for reading an article and delivering poor UX would disengage that user. One of the first movers to improve overall UX was Medium.com, by delivering one of the best design concepts of article content delivery and gamification. …

Coding is not an easy process, especially if you have to be super focused to do it relatively fast and without bugs. Keeping the focus on coding only is quite a difficult challenge, but this story is more about how to make the ultimate setup to code from anywhere with the internet and browser!

We at Hexometer.com traveling a lot, and sometimes switching computers to check our tools for a few days intensively, that’s why I needed an environment that will support the same coding flow on any kind of computer with internet and browser.

Probably this is not for nerd low-cost travelers, because they usually getting cheap places with a bad internet connection, and as you can imagine, the only way of making a laptop independent coding setup is to make it over the internet using a basic browser because guess what Browsers are everywhere! …

Naturally, JavaScript considered as a single-threaded programming language with Event Loop implementation as the main driving engine. However, it’s not fully like that for Node.js, because they actually implemented Thread Pooling API based on libuv the library, which is a core library for Node.js to access other OS API like networking, file system, etc...

LibUV implementation itself has this native OS-level thread pooling which with combination with non-blocking messaging API between threads gives full simulation that application acts as a single threaded, but in reality it’s divided into multiple thread, usually 2X of CPU cores.

Problem with async tasks

Usually every async/await task or Promise, in general, executing as a separate thread pool task (well task queue actually). This means that to get back a result from it, that task thread should send an async message to the main thread with the result resolved from Promise. This concurrent result is actually the whole power of Node.js …

Every React.js based website owner who cares about SEO should have a Server Side rendering setup around, which requires a lot of resources, even with some caching layer, sometimes it just blocks entire infrastructure, especially if it’s a website like ours (hexometer.com) with a dynamic traffic increase for a specific times over day.

The main problem with SSR is that it is a blocking operation, and while it is in execution the entire Node.js process is not getting any new requests, that’s why we have to have a lot of Node.js SSR processes to handle incoming requests. …

GraphQL subscriptions are the key part of our environment because it allows using the same schema/query based concept but with live WebSocket updates over multiple UI components. Especially considering our use-case for UI <> API communication at Hexometer.com, some of our website analysis tools can give a response with a partial data or it could take a significant amount of time. Using WebSockets allows us to send data to UI whenever our tools are ready to respond.

Besides UI convenience, there is actually a lot of benefits in having Queue + PubSub based system to handle user requests, because everything operates in an async way, without spinning up new service or allocating more resources to process every request. However, of course, there are some downsides, specifically managing WebSocket connections could require a lot more resources than a standard request-response cycle. …

UPDATED! I submitted PR with the most important fixes and they accepted changes :) https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin.org/pull/10

I’ve started trading crypto about a year ago, and it was surprising to see how bad they are in website building. You kind of expect that modern tech companies, especially the most innovative ones, would have the best functional website, built with the latest technologies and without any issues. Let’s face the truth that nowadays we have a full guide on how to build a website in the right way and how to manage web content, including SEO titles/descriptions.

Without any specific intention of searching something, about a month ago I’ve checked LiteCoin Website (litecoin.org) with Hexometer Tools, and it turned out that the 4th largest cryptocurrency has basic website issues. I’m generally OK with it, but it seems very odd that they don’t care that match about online presence. …