From Django to React: How to Write Frontend if You Are a Backend Developer

From Django to React: How to Write Frontend if You Are a Backend Developer

By Jorge Galvis, IOD Expert

Backend developers in a web application project are in charge of the components that users don’t see (database connections, cache systems, performance, security, and transactions, among others). Chances are that a backend may end up writing a bit of code for client apps, too: because of the lack of available JavaScript developers at any given moment, perhaps, or because a manager wants all features to be completed by one developer. Whatever the reason, when a backend programmer has to write frontend code, it causes a bit of frustration. Usually they don’t like to write styling (CSS), nor markups (HTML), and they probably don’t like JavaScript at all.

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Just a Few AWS Tricks I Learned on the Way

Just a Few AWS Tricks I Learned on the Way

By John Fahl, IOD Expert
Once you work with AWS long enough, you realize it changes all the time.
Some things that were difficult last year are now easy.
Who remembers ELB IPs moving on you? Normally, when you use a CNAME (like you’re supposed to) it doesn’t matter, but I’ve moved a few apps that used hardcoded IPs in old applications. Now, you can just abandon the legacy ELB and use their NLB for that issue. NLB and ALB were big improvements over traditional ELB.
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Do You Test Your Deployments Like You Test Your Application?

Do You Test Your Deployments Like You Test Your Application?

By Piotr Gaczkowski, IOD expert
Almost every modern programming language comes with some testing support built-in. Yet, there aren’t so many frameworks for testing servers and deployments. “Wait a second,” you might be thinking right now. “Servers and deployments aren’t code. They should be provisioned by IT operations, not tested along the application lifecycle, right?”

Unfortunately, the answer is, “No.” What used to be a separate job left to dedicated specialists is evolving in an agile manner. When development happens fast, there is no room for separate stages of development, testing, and deployment.
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Roll Out Your Personal CI with Docker

Roll Out Your Personal CI with Docker

The term Continuous Integration (CI) is no longer a fancy new topic in the industry. With the recent rise of such services as Travis or CircleCI, everyone can use a free CI server for their open-source projects or buy a paid support for private ones.
Catching bugs before they reach customers has never been easier provided you invest in some form of automated tests to run each time a code changes. Even though most of us have access either to the above-mentioned services or to the company’s CI servers, sometimes a personal CI system may also be helpful.
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Why You Might Need Ansible and Not Even Know It

Why You Might Need Ansible and Not Even Know It

Do you want to start using Ansible? Are you already using it, but coming up against challenges? Even if you don’t fall into either category, don’t stop reading. I’m going to show you why you might actually need Ansible and how to best take advantage of it..
Ansible’s catchphrase is “simple IT automation,” which is a pretty accurate description of what it does. In its most popular mode of operation (there are several), Ansible is described as a desired state of input, and it manipulates a set of machines to achieve this state. At this point, you may be thinking “yeah, but we’ve already got shell scripts for that.” Ansible, though, offers several advantages over good old shell scripts.
First of all, the playbook, which describes the desired state, is declarative and written in YAML. Using a playbook means you don’t need to handle the error control and condition checking yourself. It also means no actions will be taken if the state is already satisfied (e.g. apt-get won’t run if there’s an nginx package installed).
But this is only part of the story.
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