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…

As they say, there is more than one way to skin a cat. As it happens there is also more than one way to create a React component, which is much more animal friendly!

I keep coming back to React for my projects, especially now I am using Gatsby for my blog. When I do I have to try and remember all the different ways you can create components in react.

Hopefully, this page will help as a reference for you for the different ways to create a React component.

Functional components

The simplest way to create a component in React is…