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Marcelog published article intended for PHP developers that want to understand and start learning and coding Erlang applications. Author tried to point out main differences between these two distant worlds from a general perspective.

Briefly mentioned are (amongst others):

• Processes and concurrent programming in PHP and Erlang
• PHP REPL and the Erlang shell
• PHP and Erlang virtual machines
• Source file structure in PHP and Erlang
• PHP and Erlang data types

And more. You will get a very basic but clear idea of what is Erlang / OTP. Also some example code and further references will help you out in writing actual Erlang code. Good job!

Bennett Feely nice write-up on using one or more newer CSS properties (background-blend-mode, mix-blend-mode, or filter) and how it gives us a surprising amount of possibilities to manipulate a single source image.

One of the techniques described is Blending. In most of these effects the single source background-image url is repeated one or more times and blended with itself using CSS blend modes (multiply, overlay, screen, difference, etc.)

In some of these effects, the CSS filter property is used to further refine the output. Functions like grayscale(), brightness(), and contrast() can and should be tweaked to achieve a better result for images you use.

Some of effects recreated in article (plus code):

• Pencil
• Colored Pencil
• Watercolor
• Chalkboard
• Collage and more…

The CSS code in CodePen and whole library can be downloaded. Excellent not only for front-end guys.

Chimezie Enyinnaya blog post addressing all the fuss about GraphQL and what makes it different from REST. In this article, author took a technical look at REST versus GraphQL, comparing and contrasting the two API specifications.

GraphQL is a declarative data fetching specification and query language for APIs. It was created by Facebook back in 2012 to power their mobile applications. Both specifications for building and consuming APIs and both be operated over HTTP, though GraphQL is protocol agnostic.

The most significant improvement that GraphQL introduced is data fetching. And post also target:

• Network requests differences
• Over / under fetching
• Error handling
• Caching
• Versioning

You will also learn about GraphQL ecosystem and look at some libraries, tools and services that will make working with GraphQL awesome. Nice.

Sriram Rajan article in which author looks at AWS ECS and how it can be used to deploy Docker containers. From a use-case perspective, ECS allows you to build a production-scale, auto-scaling and monitored platform for running these types of containers.

At a high level, ECS (Amazon EC2 Container Service) is a cluster management framework that provides management of EC2 (Elastic Compute) instances running as Docker Hosts. It includes a scheduler to execute processes/containers on EC2 instances and has constructs to deploy and manage versions of the applications.

Article focuses on:

• ECS concepts
• Preparation of security groups
• Preparation of load balancer
• How to prepare Docker images
• How to build ECS cluster

Example code for everything mentioned above is provided. There is a lot more to ECS - happy reading.

Bertrand Dubaut article from presentation given at the Amsterdam Ruby meetup. Real life GraphQL in production implementation, mistakes made, corrections and lessons learnt. System supports multiple clients (mobile and web).

They decided to go with GraphQL to help them to solve problems like: (1) Support multiple clients with different requirements (2) Endpoints becoming overloaded with options (3) Duplicated endpoints (4) Specific client/customer requests leading to single use case endpoints.

And main mistakes?:

• Poor early schema design
• Returning classic HTTP error codes with empty responses
• Choosing a collection pattern early

Article will help you decide if GraphQL can be a good fit for you. The example code is provided in the GitHub repo. Good read!

Maya Benari long article describing design thoughts behind architecture for federal websites. Team unified a complex system with numerous rules to serve users from all corners of the country.

They focused on main pain point with nearly 30,000 U.S federal websites - inconsistent user experiences across government websites. Could they create a shared set of tools to provide consistent, effective, and easy-to-use government websites?

Author then describes how they went about:

• Selecting the team
• Building the system and bringing consistency across interactions
• Interface inventory and surfacing common colors and component styles
• Process od mood boarding
• Typography

We especially liked part about how they chose fonts that were free and open source to make it easy for government designers to use without additional burdens around licensing. (Often requirement with government financed projects)

Very interesting and in depth article with treasure of information. If you need redesign large systems this is definitely article worth of reading.

Szczepan Faber blog post about LinkedIn code review process. LinkedIn recently passed the milestone of having conducted one million code reviews. The head of the social networking service’s tooling shared a few learned lessons along the way.

Good code reviews with meaningful, useful comments can really help with leveling up an entire engineering organization. One of the biggest benefits of implementing company-wide code reviews has been increased standardization in LinkedIn development workflow.

Article then describes in details some interesting code review points:

• Do I Understand the “Why”?
• Am I Giving Positive Feedback?
• Is My Code Review Comment Explained Well?
• Am I Too Pedantic in My Review?

And much more… Excellent read!

Alan Morel extensive tutorial in which, he will be creating a simple single-page application with basic routing using the new and young Moon.js library. In one of the routes, there will be a basic calculator that takes advantage of Moon’s computed properties feature to do addition of two numbers. The user is able to change the values using a number input tags.

Tutorial provides with everything you will need for building an app, incl:

• How to install Nodejs and npm
• How to install http server
• How to utilise routing
• Support for components
• And computed properties

Moon.js is still a fairly new library, but that’s no reason not to go further with it. Good read.

Bobby Brennan post about hot topic - Promises in ECMAScript 6 and specifically he writtes about Patterns and Anti-Patterns. Node.js has adopted the latest and greatest JavaScript features, and since v4 has supported Promises. But while Promises make code more concise and readable, they can be a bit daunting to those who are only familiar with callbacks.

Article then deals with Patterns and Best Practices, e.g.:

• Using Promises
• Promisifying callbacks
• Promisifying values
• Running in parallel
• Running in series
• Racing
• Catching errors and more …

Excellent read. Follow to discover Anti-patterns plus all the demo code.

Josh Morony blog post on topic of creating Ionic app which will use TouchID feature to verify a user.

If you own an iOS device then you will have likely come across the TouchID feature at some point – it allows you to easily unlock your phone with your fingerprint rather than a passcode. This tutorial will teach how to create Ionic app using this feature.

The TouchID authentication can also be passed by using the passcode for the device. Tutorial then describes what you will need to create app with useful links to other resources if you need to grasp basic Ionic concepts first.

Apart from obvious bits - e.g. how to generate Ionic app and how to create the verification lock screen - you will get loads of example code with explanation. Excellent read.