NATS likes to call itself the "central nervous system of distributed computing" but really it's just a modern take on traditional message queues such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, and so on. Still, the design principles and the configurability of NATS made it a compelling choice for a

A "portfolio" hasn't been necessary nor requested for most of my career, but it feels like more and more I'm seeing places that prioritize candidates with a visible, public portfolio of work or ask explicitly for snippets of recent production code to demonstrate recent

When people say “microservices” I feel like they imagine a fleet of VMs or container pods running a bunch of small and “compartmentalized” applications that communicate with each other in vast and complex manners. But honestly, that’s not what microservices is supposed to be about. Companies like Netflix certainly

I’ve recently been reflecting on the many investments I’ve made through Kickstarter over the last decade. I backed my first campaign shortly after Kickstarter had turned 1. At the time I was primarily interested in giving video game developers that had worked on previous games a chance to

It’s possible to now have Docker Desktop run a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which is wonderful for anyone that needs to emulate the Kubernetes environment for their development purposes. After all, if you’re building an application that will be deployed via Kubernetes, it is helpful to have your development

Update 2024-06-16: Google Stadia sunset after only a couple years of operation. The unfortunate part is that there were legitimately some great "first-party" games that had launched on it and I really did enjoy being able to just carry my Stadia controller to any TV or computer in

For anyone using GitLab’s Managed Apps, specifically the cert-manager, be advised that you need to re-install (uninstall/install) the app if you first installed it prior to September 22, 2019. Most people that need to have probably already done so, but my cert was active until right around Christmas,

I had a $150 credit on my Google Store account after my purchase of a Pixel 3 XL and there is nothing on the Google Store, beside the Pixel phones, that is really worth spending any money on. Except maybe a Chromecast. But then Google Stadia came out for pre-order,

For those unaware of GitLab’s AutoDevOps feature, I would recommend checking out the official documentation. TL;DR GitLab is trying to make a CI/CD pipeline that’s as simple as deploying applications is with Heroku. Essentially, you “flip a switch” and any git push you do to the

There are jokes aplenty about how jobs want you to have 10 years of experience (or some other absurd number) by the time you’ve graduated college, generally implying that you need to have started on your career even prior to high school in order to have enough experience to

A few months ago I decided to embark on some personal programming using Elixir. I loved Erlang when I first played around with it many years ago and have enjoyed Elixir since the initial release (long before it hit 1.0). Around this same time I was setting up to

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Docker and docker-compose. Docker good, docker-compose better For small projects where you don’t need a collection of services that speak to each other, Docker is great. It’s all you really need to get a reliable app environment up

This is designed to be a multi-part article. This first post, the introduction, talks about what the plan was and how it came to be along with some of the concerns and questions we had prior to starting implementation. The following parts discuss the exact details behind each of the