How To Use Let’s Encrypt on Kubernetes to Automatically Generate Certs
HTTPS is an extremely important part of deploying applications to the web. It ensures encrypted transport of information between client and server. It can be complicated to set up, but Let’s Encrypt helps solve this problem by providing free SSL/TLS certificates and an API to generate these certificates. Kubernetes allows you to define your application runtime, networking, and allows you to define your infrastructure declaratively through code; making it easier to maintain, review, and share.
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Kubernetes: How Do I Do That?
Kubernetes (lovingly referred to as “K8s”, “K8”, or even “the Kubes”) is becoming the most widely adopted container cluster manager out there. At a very basic level, Kubernetes provides an abstraction layer over containers that allows developers to organize all the different layers of their application through Kubernetes configurations. The challenge with Kubernetes is that you need to understand when and how to correctly use the abstractions it provides.
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The 10 Commandments of Code Reviews
Code reviews are one of the most important parts of an engineering team’s workflow. The benefits of code reviews include: creating visibility for new changes, preventing bugs, improving code quality, and creating cohesive patterns. Despite the benefits, code reviews can sometimes create tension in the team: some developers are stricter than others, some take a long time to review, etc.. Often, these tensions come from a lack of agreement of how code reviews should be conducted and what the roles of a reviewer and a submitter should be.
I wrote the 10 commandments for code reviews, to create a common understanding for reviewers and submitters about how code reviews should be conducted. By following them, teams share a common understanding of their responsibilities, reduce the tension between teammates, and deploy their code faster. Since reviewers and submitters have very different responsibilities, I split the 10 commandments in 2—5 commandments for each role. Each set of commandments were written with the other set in mind, which means that both sides need to obey the commandments to reap the benefits.
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New ES6 Features in Node LTS
A couple of weeks ago, Node.js released its latest LTS: version 6.9.0. I realized this was the case because one of our services broke. It used the nodejs:lts image and got upgraded by mistake. Inspired by this breaking of one of our services, I decided to dig into what was new in this version of Node. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through some of the new ES6 additions to Node and how they will change the code you write.
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5 Time-Saving Bash Scripts
A good developer is a lazy developer. A good developer should always hate doing the same things over and over again. One of the best ways to embrace the laziness and be more efficient is through writing good shell scripts. In this blog post, I’ll show some of the tricks I’ve recently learned while writing some more complex bash scripts.
Note: In this post I’ll be talking specifically about bash, since it’s what I use and what I prepared all examples with, but most of it should work with other shells.
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Handling Errors with ES6
Over the last couple of months, we’ve transitioned away from callback-style error handling. Instead, we’re handling our errors with ES6 features (mainly promises and classes). In this post, I’ll talk about why we’ve made this transition.
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9 Common Dockerfile Mistakes
We work with Dockerfiles on a daily basis; all the code we run for ourselves and for our customers, we run from a set of Dockerfiles. In this article, we’ll talk about what mistakes people commonly make, and how to write them better. For those of you who are Docker experts, a lot of the tips in this article will probably be pretty obvious and will just provoke a lot of head-nodding. But for beginner to intermediate developers, this will be a useful guide that will hopefully help clean and speed up your workflow.
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Bluebird in the wild: Advanced promise-based workflows
Over the last months, we‘ve been converting our code from using callbacks to using promises. In our coding style, we‘ve found promises to be a cleaner way to organize code and a better way to deal with error handling. As we‘ve done more and more of this, we‘ve gotten better at identifying effective patterns for using promises and the best ways to migrate to them. We‘ve also found Bluebird to be the best promise library out there. Bluebird not only provides solid performance, but it also provides wonderful abstractions over promises.
In this article, I‘ll show you some of the more useful methods in Bluebird and how we use these here at Runnable. Some of these are taken directly from our codebase in order to help out anyone looking to start migrating to promises or just improve and clean up your current implementations.
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