Optimize Docker images for Ruby on Rails applications

This article shows how to optimize a Docker image for a Ruby on Rails application both in terms of making the image as small as possible as well as how to improve the time it takes to create the image.

Setting up a NAT gateway on AWS using Terraform

We’re in the middle of migrating a lot of our infrastructure components to AWS. One thing that took me a while to wrap my head around is how to setup a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) at AWS in a way that all our outgoing traffic is routed via a fixed IP address. In this article I will demonstrate how this can be done, using Terraform to setup all required resources at AWS.

Using Terraform to provision infrastructure resources

As we create more and more new service and require more and more infrastructure resources to support those services, we have started to use Terraform to manage our infrastructure.

In this article, I would like to give an overview of how we structure our Terraform setup.

It’s designed to build up a common vocabulary and understanding of why we do things the way we do them and provide a little bit of background information how and why we made the decisions that lead to the current setup.

As we’re using AWS to deploy our cloud infrastructure, most of the examples will relate to AWS but in principle should be provider-agnostic and can apply to other providers as well.

How to setup proxy authentication in AWS API Gateway with Ruby

There will always be the cases where your Amazon API Gateway endpoints, or even generally speaking some of your API endpoints hosted wherever, have to be protected from the public. Some things are just not meant for the outside world (yet!) and they have to be kept away. There are multiple reasons to this, i.e. protected endpoints serve as your sandbox/test systems, data/information protection, maintaining of business reputation amongst end users, keeping low infrastructure costs/bills e.t.c. The lastly mentioned reason will be relevant in this article, especially in relation to the Amazon WebServices (AWS) infrastructures.

A quiet straightforward way to protect your endpoint is by integrating the HTTP Basic Authentication. It might seem like a no-brainer, but integrating this into your Amazon API Gateway proxy might be rather tedious.

This article explains how set up a simple but effective configuration on the AWS ecosystem using an endpoint proxy hosted through the Amazon API Gateway with the following instructions below.

Why my local development environment will never mirror the production environment

A few days ago I stumbled upon a discussion on Twitter of whether or not a local development environment should be kept identical to the production environment:

A decade ago, we had a simple rule: Keep your dev environment identical to production environment.

Is it even possible today?

— Jaana B. Dogan (@rakyll) August 13, 2019

The original assumption in the tweet is by itself interesting: Did we actually have that rule? Keep the development environment identical to the production environment? Did it ever work?

From my personal close to 20 year experience in software engineering I never had the situation where a development environment actually mirrored the production environment. And I would even go as far as to say: That’s a good thing!

Let’s dive into why I think that is.

Why and how to pick a UI framework for prototyping web-based experiences.

When you are looking for a way to build useful, usable and beautiful digital products in a faster way, UI frameworks might be worth a look. But since there are tons of options, deciding on one is definitely challenging: Here is how we approached this challenge.

How we deal with behaviours and boilerplate

We at BetterDoc are big fans of using the Elixir library mox for creating test mocks. When using mox you define behaviours as basis for your mocks. You can think of behaviours as interfaces in object oriented languages such as Java: a set of function signatures that a module has to implement.

While this approach is great - check out this blog post on the why - it tends to require a bit of boilerplate code. In this post we are going to explore how we use behaviours for mocking, the reasoning behind it, and how we reduced the necessary boilerplate to an absolute minimum by using metaprogramming.

Why we should consciously think about ethics in our day-to-day business

Some rationals to stop talking and start acting.

Hosting the Web Meetup Cologne

We are proud to host the Web Meetup Cologne this evening in our office.

Topics for the evening: “Writing SPAs without JS and code without bugs”.

A better JSON export for Heroku Dataclips with jq

Are you using PostgreSQL on Heroku? Then, you should know Heroku Dataclips, a no-hassle, web based tool you can use to access and export your data using SQL. And it even supports JSON export! Sadly, the JSON exported by Heroku is not as nicely formatted as you might wish for in some situations.