Microservices + Node.js

We covered the basic principles of a microservices architecture, but we'll also look into the practicalities of implementing it from a technical standpoint. As we've seen, microservices are agnostic of technology, so you could use any programming language or environment to build them. In this article we'll see why JavaScript — and the Node.js environment in particular — is a good candidate.

Microservices: not a free lunch

By now you should have a fairly good understanding of what microservices are and the problems they solve. Many organisations, big and small, have done incredibly positive transformations off the back of this architecture. But there is also the other side of the coin and it would be irresponsible to write about the wonders of microservices without also covering the complications they can bring. When implemented poorly, or when done for the wrong reasons, this architecture can create more problems than the ones it solves and quickly result in disaster.

Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture

At this point, you might rightfully argue that a lot of the principles we used to characterise microservices resemble the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), a software design pattern that gained immense popularity in the early 2000s. Wikipedia defines SOA as: A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a style of software design where services are provided to the other components by application components, through a communication protocol over a network.

The principles of microservices

In the previous article, we introduced the concept of microservices and established a parallel with the traditional monolithic approach. In this article, we’ll continue with that comparison whilst we cover the key principles behind a microservices architecture and how they can help an organisation build better software systems.

Introduction to microservices

Designing software systems is hard. When I first mastered a programming language, I started to feel confident about writing code and even proud of how efficient, elegant and flexible I could make it. But little did I know that writing software is so much more than that.

Static API generator

When I first started building websites, the proposition was quite basic: take content, which may or may not be stored in some form of database, and deliver it to people's browsers as HTML pages. Over the years, countless products used that simple model to offer all-in-one solutions for content management and delivery on the web. Fast-forward a decade or so and developers are presented with a very different reality. With such a vast landscape of devices consuming digital content, it's now imperative to consider how content can be delivered not only to web browsers, but also to native mobile applications, IoT devices, and other mediums yet to come.

Explain it like I'm five: fog computing

Have you ever thought about what happens when you type an address in your web browser? Like, what actually happens behind the scenes so that a page with the content you’re looking for lands on your screen? Where is that content coming from? As you might know, the Internet is just a massive group of interconnected computers, each of which is identified by a unique address (much like your home address). When you type the address to a website in your browser, you’re sending a message to the computer that lives on that address, asking it to send you the files with the content you’re after.

Lazy loading images with DADI CDN recipes

Images are amongst the most common culprits of poor performance in websites, as they often require sending several megabytes of data across the wire for a single asset. When the network conditions are less than ideal, this can have a huge impact on load times and potentially make the website unusable. To get around this, developers typically resort to lazy loading, a technique that comprises of sending a tiny temporary image with the initial payload (usually a blank pixel), which is then replaced when the real image, fetched asynchronously, has been downloaded and is ready to be used.

Using SVG clip-path to change a logo's colour on scroll

Last week I put together a landing site for a new business. The design was quite straightforward: a single page with various sections represented as full-width horizontal blocks with different background colours, and a fixed positioned logo on the top-left corner. The only particularity was that the logo should change colours, as the user scrolls, depending on which section it overlaps.

Tests for feature requests

One of the biggest challenges associated with maintaing an open-source project is to deal with bug reports and feature requests. GitHub issues provide a great space for discussion between the community and the project maintainers, but even when they contain finely detailed and crystal clear information (which is rare), there's still room for miscommunication that often cause frustration on both parties.

Deploying to Heroku with Haiku

This is a demo of Haiku, a platform that creates Heroku applications on-demand from pull requests in your GitHub repository. The idea is that every time you create a new pull request, the state of the branch you're about to merge is used to create and build a new Heroku application, which will give you a unique URL that can be used to test the new state, or to share a feature with a colleague or client.

Creating a staging environment for Jekyll

A staging or pre-production environment is a testing infrastructure that replicates as best as possible the setup of a live site. In the context of a Jekyll site, it can be used to share a new post or feature with a selected group of people before a roll out to the general public. In this post, I'll show you how I created one and how I make use of it.

SpeedTracker at London Web Performance

Earlier this month, I gave a talk about SpeedTracker at London Web Performance, a monthly meetup for web performance professionals and enthusiasts, hosted at The Financial Times, in London. It was a great opportunity to spread the word about the project and get feedback from fellow developers. Hopefully, it also served to recruit some open-source lovers to help me with this endeavour!

Contributing to Mozilla Firefox DevTools

In 2007, Firebug 1.0 was released as a Mozilla Firefox add-on. This was the first set of browser development tools to feature a DOM inspector, a console and a JavaScript debugger in one place, which revolutionised front-end development tooling and shaped the way other browsers approached it too. A decade later, Firefox DevTools takes its place and I thought it'd be a great time to contribute to it. This article describes my experience in doing it, hoping to convince you to do the same.

Working remotely

It's been just over a year since I joined DADI and, like everyone else in the company, started working fully remotely. There are still many people that are curious and intrigued by this work style and there are certainly many myths around it; after a year of experiencing it myself, I thought I'd share some of my own views on the matter.