On the surface the Buffer link counting service is pretty simple. Its job is to keep track of the number of times someone has created a Buffer post with a given url embedded into it. » read more

You’ve shipped your first deployment to Kubernetes. But are you ready to start handling production traffic? Here’s an approach to load testing and setting resource limits on Kubernetes deployments. » read more

Integration testing is often a difficult venture, especially when it comes to distributed systems. Even if you’re building a monolithic app you probably need to spin up a database to do integration testing. It’s also the kind of thing that’s simple to do early on, but gets exponentially harder as the codebase expands. Thankfully Docker Compose gives us the ability to do integration testing in any environment that runs docker. » read more

Last August, I set out to create a streamlined development environment for building microservices. The goal was to leverage Docker to keep things consistent between development and production environments. For the most part I was able to achieve this goal, however the solution involved a bunch of time consuming setup and configuration. Since then, the Docker has released a private beta that allows you to run Docker containers locally (well, on the slick xhyve hypervisor). So as a followup to Developing Inside Docker Containers With OS X I’d like to share some of the improvements this has made to the developer experience. » read more

React has been around since 2013 and is consumed by millions (via web apps like Facebook and Instagram). I’ll walk through building a simple react component, discussing the differences between props and state as well as digging into the lifecycle of a component. » read more

It’s been a hell of a (nearly) 4 years living here in the heart of Silicon Valley. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazingly talented people at both large companies and startups. I have no regrets moving here. I’m one of those midwesterners you hear about migrating west to look for gold. Except the gold for me wasn’t necessarily money, I was looking for a guarantee. I was after experience of building a company. » read more

One of the biggest selling points of Docker is consistency between your development and production environments. But there are plenty of challenges when setting up a development environment inside of a Docker image (especially on an OS X host). After spending some time getting familiar with Docker and Vagrant, I learned a number of things I felt would be valuable to share. » read more

Last week I started digging into the internals of the React Native project. I was looking to get a better understanding of how to debug and profile React Native apps with Chrome Developer tools. What I learned was a bit surprising and showed huge potential for future app developers. » read more

Elasticsearch is a powerful fulltext search engine with an API. Meteor is a fullstack reactive framework for building mobile and web apps in pure javascript. Here’s how we integrated search into Respondly. » read more

I spent some time running through the React Native tutorial and studying the APIs. It’s a great tutorial because it shows you how to get data from a RESTful API and update a React Native view. One thing that seems understated is that you can use NPM packages. » read more

Since working with meteor in production at Respondly, a particularly difficult class of bugs has presented itself. It’s related to Meteor’s fantastic reactive Tracker package. As more people contribute to a codebase, knowledge tends to spread out across the team making it more difficult for one person to contribute. Here’s an example of the problematic pattern: » read more

At one point in your life as a human, you’re going to have trouble sleeping. My experience was like most as it was a slow progression to poor quality of sleep. I’ll start by laying out my pattern (not exact but typical) and then follow up with what I changed that led to a better nights sleep. » read more

This whole thing got started about a year ago while getting spun up on Meteor. I was hacking together a project to stream the latest tweets – creatively named Meteor Twitter Stream. By a stroke of luck, I made a mistake that exposed my API key. Within a couple hours of the project getting retweeted by Meteor, Tim Haines graciously pointed out the error. A year later, I ended up joining Tim and Phil Cockfield at Respondly. » read more

As a SV noobie, I’d recently been turned on to hackathons. To me the name Hackathon is a bit misleading. It’s less of a marathon and more like a long game of plinko fueled by gallons of coffee and several “Aha!” moments. But after a couple of them I’ve started to notice some patterns in successful hacks. » read more