Author: chriseyre2000

What Mentoring on Exercism.IO Involves

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

I mentor the Elixir and Groovy tracks on exercism.io.

Exercism.io is a Code Practice and Mentorship site.

Students sign up to various language tracks, attempt to solve problems and post a solution (which may or not be complete) possibly with a comment (mentors do like comments).

Mentors are asked to commit to marking 10 solutions a week, which should take about an hour. However it does not matter if you can only do one per week – every little helps.

Mentoring is a great way of deepening your knowledge of a language. You will need to be able to explain ways of improving code or hints on solving a problem to someone who may:

  • Not know the language
  • Have limited English skills

This is a great way to practice code reviews.

There is no need to have finished a track, although it may help if you have finished one or two exercises.

Sign up now

Interesting Article on Elixir Releases

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

Releases are the most complete deployment option for an Elixir project.

The article: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2019/05/updating-hex-pm-to-use-elixir-releases/?utm_campaign=blog-post-promotion&utm_medium=email&utm_source=subscribers-list

There are several ways to deploy an Elixir application:

  • Source code run with elixir script.exs
  • Run with mix
  • Deployed using an escript
  • A full release

The last of these is the most robust solution which will permit clean upgrades.

The term Application in Elixir is akin to a library in other languages.

An Elixir solution is more of a mini operating system with processes.

Brexit Options

~ chriseyre2000 ~ 3 Comments

We have a Conservative leadership election in the wake of the EU election results.

Here are the facts:

The EU will not reopen negotiations.

Our current extension will run out at Halloween.

There are three options for parliament:

  1. Accept May’s deal
  2. Revoke Article 50
  3. Crash out with No Deal

The first has been repeatedly rejected by parliament.

The third will not be able to win over the house of commons, but will be the default should nothing be agreed.

The Brexit party would like to be part of negotiations but since the EU are not interested that won’t help.

Something needs to move, and that will either take a fresh election or a referendum.

We have a weak opposition (unable to decide if it is pro or anti Brexit) and a minority government unable to act.

The Conservatives will consider a Step to the Right (timewarp anyone?) to appeal to the Brexit party voters.

The Brexit party had no manifesto so its impossible to know what form of Brexit that they want. The best guess would be the No Deal option.

On The Unsuitability of The Candidates

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The UK faces the prospect of a new Prime Minister selected from a list that is packed with entirely unsuitable candidates:

CandidateReason
Boris JohnsonMr Johnson is facing a private prosecution
over claims he deliberately lied during
the Referendum campaign.

 Mr Johnson is reported to
have replied: “Fuck business.”
Michael GoveI think the people in this country have
had enough of experts.
Stabbed Boris Johnson in the front during the previous
leadership campaign.
Jeremy HuntMessed up security contracts at the Olympics.
Hated by the NHS.
Can’t remember which country his wife is from.
Andrea Leadsom“Being a mother gives me an edge on May”
Withdrew from ballot versus May
Ester McVeyMisled parliament over the new Universal Credit 
scheme
Dominic RaabSurprised that Britain is an island

There are other candidates (and more will appear over the next few days).

Handling a Headless CMS

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

This is a general outline for using a headless CMS (such as Contentful).

There are other ways to do this but this is fast given a suitable size delta, and will recover from failure better than webhooks:

This has the headless CMS being polled by a Static Site Generator.

The Static Site Generator knows the current state of the site and only regenerates changed items. This may require it to keep a map of dependencies between nodes. Sometimes you may need to go 3 or 4 levels deep. Store the output in S3. Serve the website from S3, which allows some customisation of the data. Use a CDN to back the website to reduce load. Purge the pages of the site that have changed after they have been written.

We managed to use a single Heroku node for the SSG and another one for the webserver.

Groovy Closures

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Some of my team have been impressed with Groovy’s support for closures:

Here is a simple closure:

def time(String message, Closure body) {
  def start = Instant.now()
  def result = body.call()
  def finish = Instant.now()
  Duration duration = Duration.between(start, finish)
  log.info("$message took $duration")
  result
}

This would allow you to go from:

def value = complexDatabaseQuery(1, 2, 3)

to

def msg = "Complex query 1, 2, 3"
def value = time(msg, {complexDatabaseQuery(1, 2, 3)})

This provides a simple decorating wrapper that records the time that the database call took without making the code less readable.

This could be made more sophisticated using:

def warnSlow(String message, def max_duration_in_seconds = 5, Closure body) {
def start = Instant.now()
def result = body.call()
def finish = Instant.now()
Duration duration = Duration.between(start, finish)
if (duration.getSeconds() > max_duration_in_seconds) {
warn “$message is slow, it took $duration which is longer than the threshold of $max_duration_in_seconds”
}
result
}

This permits simple performance checks to be added to code with minimal disruption.

Replacing a MongoDB with a Lambda

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

The project that I currently work on uses a number of microservices. Several of these microservices use MongoDB. The platform provider that we are using to host these databases (compose.io) has announced that they are going to stop supporting Mongo in about two months time.

This has resulted in a thorough investigation of the mongo databases that we are using.

Several of the services use the following architecture:

This has three instances of an application that periodically poll a website before performing sending the result to rabbitmq. They use the mongodb as a lock so that only one of the three perform the operation.

The alternative design was to add an external scheduler to trigger the nodes. The load balancer would pick one of the nodes to perform the work. One of my colleagues pointed out that we could use a lambda to do this. Lambdas are (typically) javascript functions that are cloud hosted.

It it is possible to deploy a lambda with a schedule of how frequently it should be invoked, either with a given frequency or via a CRON-like specification. The lambdas invoke methods on the nodes that asynchronously trigger the process.

Here is a diagram of the replacement:

This has allowed us to replace three MongoDB’s in each of four environments with a much simpler lambda function.

In addition we have been able to remove the mongodb database driver and the internal cron scheduling components. This greatly simplifies these services. There is now less to maintain (less PR’s from dependabot). It is also far easier to test code that is called from an endpoint than one from a scheduled event.

We do still need to replace the remaining MongoDB’s which contain real data but this is a much more manageable job.

We also learned that AWS still uses Node 8 LTS for Lambda.

This is a great starting point for serverless functions.