TIL, 2018-02-26, Time for Brunch

Musings

• Apparently, I’ve been running a non up-to-date version of Phoenix. I have the rc version.
  • The newer versions have an assets directory, I was able to get the builds working.
  • You just npm install bootstrap, change the Brunch config file, and when you run mix phx.server, Brunch will compile everything. It will show you also the errors.
• Flash message view helper. I can’t pattern match that part.
• guardian is the most popular Authentication framework. Reference
• Remember the mapping in Controller → Template:
• It’s hard to look for tutorials re: Guardian. I’m following this: Reference.
  • You need a lot of things: pipelines, plugs, changesets, forms. It’s hard at first, because it isn’t like Devise, but I think I’ll be fine.
• Cloned Reference.
• I need to get better at the mechanics/interactions between the different layers but I like what I’m doing.
• Currently stuck at missing a JWT token, but this is probably just a config file.
• Stuck at making current_user available for the entire application. I need a big-ass plug for this.
• Phoenix umbrellas?
• I’m honestly just so damn tired but so happy that I did a lot of things today!

Asking, How do you get better at scaling websites/scalability?

Reference

• mdaffin:
  • Make it scalable across multiple servers.
  • Three parts to scale:
    • Ingestion/load balancer. HAproxy, then cluster them.
    • Your application
    • Data store. Master/slave setup to have multiple readers or master/master setup like mariadb’s galera cluster.
    • Cloud provider (Amazon AWS, Google Cloud) has features that can take care of scaling the load balancer/data stores for you.
  • Make your application nodes stateless so they do not hold any more info than what they need to serve one request. This allows you to add/remove nodes without worrying about syncing state on each node. Long term -> external data store.
  • Temporary request state: on the node, you can either move that to a central cache or route clients back to the same node.
  • The tooling: terraform and ansible to make automating things much easier.
  • Docker for microservice style architecture. Kubernetes for Docker clustering, nomad and consul.
  • On getting better:
    • Sign up for Amazon AWS, free tier for 12 months.
    • Spinning up VMs, provisioning them manually, exposing them via load balancers, and trying out auto-scaling instances.
    • terraform to provision things.
    • ansible/chef/puppet to provision servers.
    • Service discovery with consul.
    • Docker and Kubernetes, learning how to create containers locally and how to deploy them to production.
• djvirgen:
  • Horizontal scalability.
    • App is stateless.
    • Deploy multiple instances.
    • Place a load balancer in front.
    • Make sure persistence writes to a shared location.
    • Cache anything that is slow, using a shared cache if possible.
• DusmaN21: set performance budgets.
• _poq: Trial and error. Indexes are your best friend.
• the_goose_says: 95% of the problems are database-related.
• never_safe_for_life: Reference. Working for companies that force you to work with bottlenecks.

Ask HN: Whats the difference between 5/10/15 years of exp?

Reference

• matt_s: More time spent reading code now than I used to. Times to craft wonderful code and times to just get shit done.
• Juliat: Communities get fragmented, although they use the same technology. The more you learn/practice/experiment/play/discuss about/grasp the history, the wider your world view grows.
• apohn: When you get better, you get faster at recognizing when a project will fail for non-technical reasons. You also develop a desire to deal with non-technical aspects of the project, because there is a realization that a good solution to the business problem will not occur if you don’t take some ownership in the decision making process.
• psyc:
  • What gets better: breadth and depth of knowledge, problem-solving ability, intuition/heuristics, general level or complexity of the technical things I”m able to accomplish successfully.
  • Career-related things: no consistency at all. Salaries, roles, natures of jobs.
  • Much happier when I had ownership of an obscure product, rather than the maintenance duties of huge products.
• The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.