TPDP Episode #19: Automated Software Delivery For Cloud Native Applications

I’m pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast titled, Automated Software Delivery for Cloud Native Applications, has been published to all the major podcast networks, including, but not limited to, iTunes and Pocket Casts.

In this episode I’m joined by Jim Clark who is the Chief Architect at a software delivery as a service company called Atomist, where we discuss software delivery and how it can be improved within organizations to make relevant teams within them more efficient.

Containerization with Docker by Example Released

I am pleased to announce that Containerization with Docker by Example, a course I’ve been working on for a while, has been published to the popular Udemy education network.

This course, is the fifth course that I’ve released and the first that hasn’t been on the topic of mobile application development.

Mine Bitcoin And Other Cryptocurrency Coins With A CPU Miner And Docker

So you’ve been doing a lot of research around the blockchain and the various cryptocurrencies. Don’t worry, I’ve been doing a lot of the same research. There is so much in the news and on social media around this subject, it would be a good idea to educate yourself.

When it comes to cryptocurrencies, there are a lot of people trying to mine it rather than buy it. Depending on the type of currency, it could be near impossible to mine or very easy. Take Bitcoin for example. Bitcoin is one of the most difficult coins to mine, while others such as DigiByte are much easier. That’s not to say the easier coins won’t become more difficult in the future.

So how do you get started with mining?

I use a Mac. If you’re a Mac owner and you try to find a mining tool online, you’re going to struggle because most are for Windows or Linux. We’re going to see how to leverage Docker to mine via a Linux container on any platform.

Deploying Native Node.js Dependencies On AWS Lambda

I was recently working on a Functions as a Service (FaaS) project using AWS Lambda and Node.js. However, I was running into an issue where my package dependencies found in my node_modules directory were for the wrong platform once deployed to Lambda. This is not the first time I experienced a problem like this. I knew the issue straight away because I encountered the same thing when trying to use a node_modules directory generated on Mac from a Windows computer.

When uploading a package developed with Node.js to AWS Lambda, the package.json file is not considered. Instead you are uploading a package that contains the node_modules directory and all dependencies. So how do you develop for AWS Lambda from Mac and Windows, but have it work once deployed?

We’re going to see how to use Docker to get our Node.js FaaS project dependencies designed for Amazon’s flavor of Linux.

Containerizing A Node.js With Express Image Processing RESTful API Using Docker

Docker is a great way to package and deploy web applications. Applications that have been containerized can easily be created, destroyed, or even moved between servers, as long as the servers are using the Docker runtime.

Not too long ago I wrote about creating a RESTful API that could process images and generate Android compliant launcher icons. This article was titled, Create an Android Launcher Icon Generator RESTful API with Node.js, and Jimp and it was powered by Express Framework. The application could be served on any properly configured server with Node.js. The catch here is that server configuration is never easy or quick.

We’re going to see how to package our web application into a container using Docker.

Alias URLS In Hugo Websites Using RewriteRule For Htaccess

As you may remember, I recently released The Polyglot Developer 2.0 which was a migration from WordPress to Hugo. Because my WordPress permalinks matched a similar format to Hugo I didn’t have to make too many changes. However, there was an issue with the category and tag taxonomies. In Hugo these were recommended to be plural, while in WordPress they were singular.

I’m currently using Apache for hosting The Polyglot Developer so I had to figure out how to redirect the previous WordPress traffic to prevent bad links which would hurt the search engine optimization (SEO) of my blog. We’re going to see how I made such redirects happen.

Getting Familiar with Gulp for Workflow Automation

I’ve been developing web applications for as long as I can remember and there are certain repetitive tasks that I do between the development and deployment of each final product. For example, current web standards demand that web resources like CSS, and JavaScript be minified or images be compressed. We could easily do this by hand or with helper applications, but why would you want to?

Instead, repetitive tasks can, and should, be transformed into an automated workflow, something that is particularly useful when it comes to continuous integration and continuous deployment.

We’re going to see how to create a an automated workflow using the Gulp toolkit to do simple tasks like cleaning, minification, copying, altering, and even deploying projects.