Explorations of an Engineer

Adding a field to a delegated GraphQL Request

Recently I've been working a lot with GraphQL services and schema stitching, and ran into a problem with delegated queries not returning the data that my code needed unless the user requested it. I found a way to add a transform to the delegateToSchema

Bash

Detecting and cropping letterboxing using FFmpeg and Imagemagick

Learning how to detect letterboxing of videos and crop the important content to remove the letterboxing using FFmpeg and Imagemagick.

aws

How we found a TCP hangup regression between AWS ELBs and Node.js

A Node.js security patch for the SlowLoris vulnerability causes many AWS ELBs in their default configuration to throw 504 errors.

Remote Year

Staying Connected While Abroad

One of the largest concerns I've had with my plans to travel for a year is whether or not I will be able to reliably stay connected to work and things that I need to be able to monitor. As part of my job

AWS CLI get most recent image tag in ECR

The AWS CLI for ECR is missing something that would be super helpful to have in all sorts of CI/Build/Deployment environments, and that is functionality to retrieve the tag of the most recent image pushed to a repository. Fortunately, there's a one-liner

Kubernetes Service invalid clusterIP or resourceVersion

Kubernetes is a great service, but doesn't help Google image of building terrible interfaces and experiences in their engineering tools. A perfect example of this is when you attempt to modify a Service in Kubernetes that you already created and applied some updates to

kubernetes

SSL Terminated Kubernetes Load Balancers in AWS

Launching services in Kubernetes that utilize an AWS Elastic Load Balancer has long been fairly simple - just launch a service with type: LoadBalancer. Where it becomes more complicated and not nearly as well documented is when you want to do SSL termination at

Effective Application Alerting

Application downtime is an inevitable reality - even companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google suffer from instability at times. Alerts are the first line of defense when it comes to downtime, and effective alerts can be the difference between total downtime and catching an

Development tools I can't go without

I recently had to hand over my work laptop to get repaired, because the keyboard and trackpad no longer worked at all. When I got my loaner, the first thing I did was reinstall a few crucial things that make my life as a

Angular

Angular Directives with Coffeescript Class Controllers

The first time you try to set up a directive using a Coffeescript class, you might end up with something like this: class MyControllerName @$inject: ['my', 'services', 'here'] constructor: (@my, @services, @here) -> # constructor code angular.module('mymodule').controller 'MyControllerName', MyControllerName angular.module(

Hapi.js

Serverless Node.js and Angular S3 Uploads

Node.js is an incredible JavaScript runtime for server based APIs. The one place it falls down is during long running event loop blocking operations. One of the first Node based backends I wrote was Chalkup, a company I co-founded in college nearly three

Printing out entire JavaScript objects

Sometimes you want to print out more than just two levels of depth of a JavaScript object before seeing [object Object] all over the place and not having any additional visibility. Take a look at this object: obj = a: b: c: 1 If you

Angular.js $$hashKey Object Tracking

Angular is pretty magical the first time people see it. Automatic DOM updates when you update a variable in your JS, and the same variable will update in your JS file when someone updates its value in the DOM. This same functionality works across

The Hardest Part of Programming

... is easily naming things and clearing caches. There is nothing that will trip you up more than how to clear something out of the cache that you spent a while figuring out how to cache in the first place. Then there's naming things. Sure

When is code done?

I had the chance to attend an object oriented programming boot camp with Fred George last week thanks to Obie Fernandez and the fine folks I work with at 2U. One of the most interesting tidbits of information Fred passed on to us is

JavaScript

The Asynchronous Nature of JavaScript

JavaScript is a quirky language that has the ability to frustrate you to no end if you don't know about certain features. This is going to be the first of many posts about JavaScript tips and quirks, and will be focused on the asynchronous

JavaScript

The Node.js Event Loop

The Node.js event loop is one of the most confusing parts about learning how to craft a well designed server in Node. The first thing you need to understand is that Node.js is a single threaded process. This means that it can

Subscribe to Explorations of an Engineer