It is rare in software development that you are building something in complete isolation from everything else. Generally, you are going to be making calls to other systems or components.
If you are lucky you are building against an existing API that you can test against. If you are working with other teams to similar deadlines, you generally need to agree on a contract beforehand and build against it. In this case, you are going to need to mock the API to be able to test what you are building.
This is where Wiremock comes in. Other tools can be…
Often when I am creating a new website, I want to see how it is going to look on an actual device like my phone or tablet. You can use Chrome Web Tools for mimicking a device but it isn’t the same as an actual phone.
However, chances are that if you try and access the service using your IP Address on another device it will likely be blocked by your operating systems firewall. …
Recently I went through the process of setting up Drone CI on my Raspberry Pi. The plan was to use my Raspberry Pi as a build server for this website as well as other projects.
However, the Sharp image library that Gatsby uses to resize images doesn’t natively work on ARM processors. I did try to compile it in the docker image but I couldn’t get the correct version to be picked up when running the builds. On top of that the builds were incredibly slow on my already overworked Raspberry Pi 2B+.
I have recently been looking into AWS Step Functions. For those not familiar with them, Step Functions are Amazon’s way of providing a state machine as a service.
If you have used AWS you have probably used Lambda functions. Lambda functions allow you to easily put a bit of functionality into a stateless scalable component.
Of course, the issue with this is generally most business applications require some form of state to be useful. Business processes generally follow a workflow where it is only possible to complete one task once another has been completed.
AWS Step Functions allows you to…
I use docker every day. All the applications I write at work or at home end up in docker containers. Most of the time though, I am only running docker-compose up so when I need to do something more complicated I have to look it up.
So this post is a resource for me but I am hoping these commands will be useful for you too.
Cleaning up after Docker
If you have been using docker for a while you are going to end up with quite a few docker images hanging around. These commands should help clear them up.
Delete old containers
Most of the cleanup…
As you might have seen from my last few posts I have quite a lot running on my Raspberry Pi.
I am currently using a Raspberry Pi 2 B which is a great device but only has 1GB of RAM and 900 MHz CPU. So I am a little worried sometimes that I am going to overload it with all the docker services I am running on it.
I use Grafana a lot at work and love it, so I thought it would be good to use it to monitor my Raspberry Pi.
Monitoring Aim
With any monitoring, it is important to…
I wanted to put together my home build server using my Raspberry Pi. After looking at the options I picked Drone CI, it has a nice interface, simple to use and has loads of plugins available.
In my last post, I showed you how to set up Traefik as a reverse proxy for the Docker images running on your Raspberry Pi. We are going to use Traefik again so if you haven’t got it set up you can follow that post.
Giving Drone Access to GitHub
Drone CI integrates nicely with GitHub. Once set up it will automatically pick up new commits, usually within seconds…
I use my Raspberry Pi as my own personal home server. Up until recently, I have been using nginx as a reverse proxy for my docker containers. However, recently I have switched to Traefik and I have found it is much easier to maintain.
I am going to go through the steps needed to set up both and the pros and cons of each.
Prerequisites
I am going to assume you already have a Raspberry Pi set up and able to run docker images. …
I have been getting into Instagram a bit more recently and as many other users have discovered, one of the big limitations is not being able to have more than one link in your profile. Links in posts don’t work either unless it is a promoted post.
To overcome this many users resort to services such as Linktree and Solo. The downside of these services is they are generally very limited in what can be done with the free option. …
As I mentioned in my previous posts there are quite a few ways to create components in React.js. As it happens there are also quite a few ways to style components as well.
The great thing about React is you can create components in isolation. However, if you are not careful you could end up with conflicting CSS styles.
CSS has come a long way especially with the ability to use Sass and Less to create computed styles but you still need to be careful to make sure you aren’t affecting something else in your application. For anyone who has…
