Deploying a web application on Dokku

This is the second post in a series. The first post is here. In the previous post we set up a dokku server on DigitalOcean using terraform. In this post, I'm going to show you how to host a web application on your dokku server, including setting up a PostgresQL database, and an SSL certficate …

Setting up a Dokku server on DigitalOcean with Terraform

Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash Hosting hobby projects on Heroku is really easy to set up, and costs nothing, but there are a couple of problems with the free tier: It takes time to restart a project that has gone "idle". I just checked a rails project of mine, and it took 23 seconds to …

My git workflow: “git fresh”

So, apparently this is the name of a hip hop group! I thought I'd share some of my tips and shortcuts for working with git. I collaborate on a lot of github repositories with a team of colleagues, and it's important to make sure I have the latest changes before I start work, so that …

Deploy a Golang web application to Heroku

This article was originally written for devspotlight The Go programming language, often referred to as "golang", has gained a lot of well-deserved traction in the DevOps community. Many of the most popular tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform are written in Go, but it can also be a great choice for building web applications …

Pairing and code reviews during Covid19

UPDATED 2020-10-24: CodeSnip now synchronises scroll position, and highlights selected text, for everyone viewing a snippet. One of the many things I miss about working in the office is the ability to do code reviews properly with my colleagues. In the office, we could sit side by side and go over a PR, discussing various …

Use git-crypt to safely store deployment secrets in your code repos

This article was originally written for devspotlight Managing Secrets with git-crypt Many software projects use secrets - usually keys to external APIs or credentials to access an external resource such as a database. Your application needs these keys at runtime, so you need to be able to provide them when you deploy your application, or as …

Monolith to Microservices with Kafka Streaming Data Connector

This article was originally written for devspotlight If you're a team developing and maintaining a software monolith, there's a good chance you're considering or planning a move to an architecture based around microservices. I'm won't go into the various trade-offs involved in that decision in this article; rather, I will focus on one specific technique …

How to play Scrabble with your mum, during lockdown

My mother likes playing scrabble - she usually forces my teenaged nephew to play during family visits (which he reluctantly enjoys). So I wanted to find a way to play scrabble with her while we're in lockdown, and we can't visit her in person anymore. My first thought was to search the Apple app. store …

The Complete Tutorial on the Top 5 Ways to Query your Relational Database in JavaScript – Part 2

This article was originally written for devspotlight Welcome back! In the first part of this series, we looked at a very "low-level" way to interact with a relational database by sending it raw SQL strings and retrieving the results. We created a very simple express application that we can use as an example, and deployed …

The Complete Tutorial on the Top 5 Ways to Query your Relational Database in JavaScript – Part 1

This article was originally written for devspotlight If you're developing web applications, you're almost certainly going to be constantly interacting with a database. And when it comes time to select the way you'll interact, the choices can be overwhelming. In this article, we're going to look in detail at 5 different ways to interact with …