Derek Myers

Taking Docker to the Next Level

/ in dev, ops

Last year I dove into Vagrant and Chef to setup developer environments. For a while now I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Docker and why people are raving about it in the devops world so I decided try it more.

Why Docker

Docker is a very powerful tool to spin up isolated “containers” which are similar to virtual machines except that they aren’t. They are built and ran as developers choose and every step inside a build file creates an image subset that can be used as a starting point in another image.

What does that mean? Well say you have 3 steps to setup a simple WordPress server.

Continue reading…

Getting Started in Open Source

/ in dev, open source

Open source is so ubiquitous nowadays that its inevitable you are benefiting from it every day even if you don’t know it just by using applications on the desktop, web, or mobile. The applications you use most likely have dependencies that are open source. If you’re on Mac or Linux, the unix kernel that powers them is open source.

Many people including myself feel encouraged to contribute projects that we use and benefit from because it helps the ecosystem as a whole. The entire ecosystem grows exponentially as more people contribute and work together, it’s a powerful thing.

Continue reading…

Design for Programmers

/ in design

Getting Started

I am not the best designer, but I feel I am able to distinguish good design from bad. I like to keep up with the design trends of the web and be active in the community.

Resources

Frameworks

One way is to build out design is by wireframing through frameworks as a base layer and add on your custom design on top.

Continue reading…

The Future of Hosting

/ in dev, hosting, ops

The web hosting industry is rapidly changing. In the early days you had traditional hosting, but now the web is seeing a shift towards scalable PaaS and managed web hosting.

Multiple software versions

With traditional hosting, you were stuck with whatever version the server was running by your provider. If they were running PHP 4 and you wanted to build a PHP 5 app, you were just out of luck.

With cloud offerings you can generally choose different version of the software whether thats PHP or MySQL instead of just a single version fits all.

Continue reading…

Stop Breaking My Apps

/ in apis, code

APIs allow developers to integrate with sites in a way that allows for allowed or approved data sets to be retrieved and manipulated rather than scraping which can easily break with an update to an application.

The trend with APIs is that you should version them so that way developers that implement them are not susceptible to their applications breaking when the site that provides the APIs adds new features in a new version or update to their APIs.

Continue reading…

Powered by Redbull