Brandon Okert

Managing Json in Go is not a trivial problem. There are many examples out there of how to decode a simple json document into a struct, but few that answer the questions that inevitably come up: How do I provide defaults for fields? How do I make a field optional? How do I avoid using defaults for certain fields (eg: a user id)? How do I prevent pointer maintenance issues down the road?

This is the second in a two part blog about Scaling with Docker. In this part, we’ll take what we learned in Part 1 and use it to create a scalable and resilient service with Docker. While the previous part took a more conceptual route, this part will focus more on practical applications. At each stage we’ll update a set of scripts to automate building and deploying, and go through a few tests to get familiar with the results.

This is the first in a two part post about Scaling with Docker. In Part 1, we’ll focus on getting started with Docker from a scaling perspective. For the most part this will be an intro to Docker, so if you’re already experienced using mutli-container hosts, docker networks, volume containers, monitoring tools, and management scripts, feel free to skim this part. In Part 2, we’ll use the fundamentals from Part 1 to organize scalable multi-host systems, then show where to start to take that to very large scale applications.

Having recently been tasked with bringing our JS test coverage in React to >85%, I was surprised to find that there are scant resources for actually testing React components thoroughly. There are a few Test Utilities and getting started guides, but few examples to draw from for for in depth coverage. What do I do when I need to test a change in state resulting from a sequence of user actions?

Guten Tag! This weekend I build a little distributed message scheduler. I was recently motivated to learn PHP, and given a recent discussion at work, a message scheduler seemed the way to go. It fit the bill - not only would I be able to use php in a production-like setting, but I would also improve my fluency with distributed systems in general. It was also something I could get done in a reasonably short time - an important trait for an over-eager project starter like me.