Get Your Apps to the Poll (Phase)!
A month ago, I wrote about my investigation into an implementation of a real-time socket data manipulator which could eventually stall our application. While trying to research how this stuff actually worked, I couldn’t find many resources explaining how actual code goes through the event loop. Honestly, I think that’s a huge problem. I’m afraid most developers don’t understand the most critical part of Node.js, but I’m here to fix that. So, how do sockets work? How does the socket data get so backed up? Why does using a Transform solve the issue when piping with an async function does not?
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How Sockets Can Block Node’s Event Loop
Writing good code requires an understanding of how the language’s features fit together. Writing great code requires an understanding of how the code will actually run underneath. If you don’t, your code could cause huge hidden issues.
When we first started implementing our socket logic in Node.js, we didn’t have much experience with doing real-time operations with Node.js. We quickly learned that our socket experience with other stacks was of little use. The more we investigated, the less we understood. To find the solution, we first had to understand Node.js itself.
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Amazon-like Popover Trigger Behaviors in AngularJS
Creating custom UI behavior in Angular can seem daunting. Once you know how to break the problem down, its complexity can just fizzle away. In this tutorial, we’ll be exploring the use of mouse events, locations, and some simple geometry to add an on-hover popover menu to a button. Not just any simple on-hover behavior, but one that stays open if the user is heading toward the content.
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3 Ways We Improved Our Developer Hiring Process
Developer hiring. For both parties, it’s a stress-inducing and potentially life-changing decision. And yet, they each have around 4 hours to gather enough info to make that decision. How do you use that time? Are you asking questions that prove the competency you need? How do you compare candidates?
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3 Ways GitHub Integrations are About to Get Better
Recently, GitHub announced a totally new way for applications to integrate with its service. This will allow applications to act as independent entities on GitHub. Currently, applications must always impersonate a user who has the necessary permissions to perform a given action. It can be a headache managing which user an application needs to impersonate in order do the work it needs to do. GitHub’s recent change affects how applications can receive webhooks, how they interact with users, and how they connect to GitHub. Here are three ways Integrations will be easier to implement and maintain.
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Think Before You Mongo
I believe choosing the right database for your application is an even more important decision than choosing your programing language. Picking the wrong database can really hurt you down the road.
MongoDB is the go-to database for many NodeJS applications. It has its uses, but despite the hype, it’s probably not the best choice for your application’s main database. Many people choose Mongo for the same reason we did: its schema-less design makes it simple to set up. This enabled us to focus on quickly building out our MVP. But if you take this path, beware that you may be charging a large sum to your tech-debt card.
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5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Promises
Promises are amazing! The concept has been around for decades, but they are finally here in ES6! Before we switched to promises, our code was full of confusing callback tricks and async. Switching to promises made our code easier to read, understand, and test. There are so many reasons to love promises, but here are my top five.
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Stringify: The Silent Killer
How much do you log (in your application)? Do you use tools like Bunyan to make your logs easier to read? Do you Stringify everything and print it straight to console.log()? If so, logging may be the reason why you’re having trouble reducing your app’s average route response time to under 200ms.
When we first started implementing a unified logging system throughout our API, we didn’t anticipate how something as simple as logging to console could possibly slow down our system. Our data models were in their infancy; they barely had actual data on them, so it became common to just Stringify the whole object into the log. It sounded like such a great idea! Investigating bugs was easier since we had a record of the entire data object during each step of our flow.
But then things started to change…
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