Tim Costa - Explorations of an Engineer

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Tim Costa

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 for that: $ aws ecr

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 and are greeted by

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 the ELB level, a common practice

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 issue before it spirals out of

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 developer so much better. Here'

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&

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 [https://www.chalkup.co/], a company I co-founded in college nearly three years ago.

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 wanted to see the value of

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 page elements, and across controllers. The

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 you could go with

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 [http://obiefernandez.com/] and the fine folks I work with at 2U [http://www.2u.com]. One of the most interesting tidbits of information Fred passed on to us

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 nature of JavaScript. First

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 only handle one task at a