CodeIsGo.com

Brian E. Thomas article on valude proposition when negotiating new contracts. While it’s important for CIOs to provide a strategic advantage and to work on creating a partnership mentality, one area that needs to be smartly managed are those cumbersome and expensive vendor contracts.

Before CIO negotiates a key vendor contract, he/he needs to have developed the right vendor management strategy. In order to negotiate key IT vendor agreements so as to benefit your company as well as preserve the vendor relationship, CIO needs:

• Recognizing the value - strategic partners provided effective delivery and gone one step further
• Regain control - protection of your interests via four-step negotiation process (described in article)
• Additional best practices

Striking the right balance with negotiating a key vendor contract is just as much about the planning as it is about the approach.

Casey Lee post about using stelligent.com tool called mu for microservices discovery. mu is a tool that makes it simple and cost-efficient for developers to use AWS as the platform for running their microservices.

One of the biggest benefits of a microservices architecture is that the services can be deployed independently of one another.

Author also discusses common solution to microservices discovery:

• Load balancer per microservice
• Shared load balancer
• Client load balancer

In the article you’ll learn how to create a zuul router service to provide an edge service via Netflix’s Zuul. Zuul is a proxy service that serves as the front door for all requests from outside the microservice environment. Zuul will use Consul for service discovery to determine where best to route the incoming request. Consul is also used for service discovery and registration of your microservices.

If your infrastructure lives on AWS Cloud - have a look!

Dimitri Kravtchuk (MySQL Performance Architect, Oracle) - published blog post on new MySQL 8.0 performance. He writes about how their Read-Only scalability was a big pain, as Read-Only (RO) workloads were often slower than Read-Write (sounds very odd: “add Writes to your Reads to go faster”, but this was our reality ;-)) – and things were largely improved since MySQL 5.7 where we broke 1M queries per second (QPS) barrier and reached 1.6M QPS for the first time. However, improving Writes or mixed Read+Writes (RW) workloads is a much more complex story.

They identified the main scalability show-stoppers in MySQL 5.7 and current 8.0 release candidate for RW and IO-bound workloads:

• REDO log contentions are blocking your whole transaction processing
• Transaction (TRX) management
• internal locking and row locking (LOCK)
• historically as soon as you’re involving any IO operations, they all will go via one single and global locking path (fil_system mutex) which will make a use of faster storage solutions (flash) simply useless.

Article then goes in length how they redesigned InnoDB REDO with detailed charts and performance tests. Plus download the tarball with author’s scripts + sysbench binary + my.conf. Excellent!

Björn Wenzel deatiled writting on how to to setup a more complex kubernetes ingress example. This blog post is building on his previous post - Install kubernetes ingress. The application in this example has an api-server and a separate ui server.

This is hands on tutorial with many references to provided code. It focuses on:

• The ingress path-based routing for the same domain
• SSL certificate and how to add it to the cluster
• Kube-Lego deployment to the cluster for Let’s Encrypt certificate generation

You will learn how Kube-Lego can generate a kubernetes secret called with a Let’s Encrypt certificate valid for your application. And then Kube-Lego will deploy the secret for you. Excellent!

Abraham Williams sweet post about moving fast when developing. Developers want to move fast 🚀 🚀 🚀. Manually triggering a rebuild of your source code after ever little change is slow and annoying.

Webpack are constantly adding features and fixing bugs so they release pretty often. With the Webpack Dev Server and Webpack watch you can greatly improve your code, build, try cycles.

Series of commands and visual clues will guide you through this tutorial. After going through this tutorial you can write code, save it and Webpack will push the changes to the browser without you ever having to leave the editor.

Also the source code available on GitHub and check out the next article Getting started with Webpack: Source Maps.

Derrick J Wippler description how and why they jumped on service mesh bandwagon. He will tell you what is a service mesh, why they have adopted it at Mailgun, and how are they using it to deliver their software. Service mesh has officially become a thing, thanks to the launch of Istio (a joint collaboration between IBM, Google, and Lyft) and the adoption of linkerd by big companies like PayPal and Ticketmaster.

In simple terms, a service mesh is a bit of software (usually a proxy) that handles service-to-service communication in a fast and resilient manner.

You will also find:

• How they created vulcand as reverse proxy first and then extended it
• How Mailgun manages service mesh routes
• Exposing service mesh as a public api

The major advantage to service mesh is that it allows for high resiliency (no load balancer single point of failure), built-in service discovery, and zero downtime releases. Charts with architecture are provided as well. Good read!

Daniel Borowski take on a tricky Javascript question often asked by top tech companies like Google or Amazon. It is a short explanation, along with some solutions, of a popular JavaScript question that tends to get asked in developer interviews.

The question deals with the topics:

• closures
• setTimeout
• and scoping.

The question tests your knowledge of some important JavaScript concepts, and because of how the JavaScript language works this is actually something that can come up quite often when you’re working — namely, needing to use setTimeout or some sort of async function within a loop.

Definitive a must read if you aspire to pass interviews in one of unicorns. Also included are links to further resources to help you know your JavaScript better. You can also practice solving JavaScript coding challenges on Coderbyte.

Ogundipe Samuel Ogundipe Samuel detailed blog post about advanced techniques using Vue.js. Vue is arguably one of the easiest and most minimalist JavaScript frameworks with which to get started, but very few tutorials exist that cover advanced concepts in Vue. And that’s why author wrote this tutorial.

While we cannot downplay the current momentum and volume of developers adapting Vue.js, you will agree with me that there are very few tutorials that cover advanced concepts in Vue.

Apart from learning about creating and using mixins to stop code repetition, tutorial covers:

• Vue.js mixins, custom directives, filters
• Transitions (enter/leave), state management, server-side rendering

Small code examples explain above metioned concepts. The code base to this tutorial is available in a public GitHub repo. Good read.

Dimitar Mihov via tnw published article about Artificial Intelligence (AI) implemented and built by Airbnb that turns design sketches into product source code. The company is currently developing a new AI system that will empower its designers and product engineers to literally take ideas from the drawing board and turn them into actual products almost instantaneously.

“The time required to test an idea should be zero.” - Airbnb design technology lead Benjamin Wilkins.

The assumption was that, once properly trained and fine-tuned, the AI would be able to recognize Airbnb’s standard hand-drawn design components and automatically render them into actual source code. To their surprise, the outcome was more than satisfactory.

Nice! Learn more and watch video.

Jenny Mudarri neat article on gamification and why it works. It’s no secret that playing games is fun, but that’s not the only reason we keep coming back for more. After all, games are designed with the human brain in mind…

By translating elements like points, levels, and progress bars into non-game contexts, you can recreate the gaming experience. Games work because of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in your brain that’s activated whenever you achieve something positive.

You will also learn:

• Why levels keep us coming back
• Why challenges keep us interested
• How progress bars and points keep us going

Examples related to games, learning new language and also how businesses can take advantage of gamification tactics. Very interesting, with loads of charts to visualise authors point of view.