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emforce

223 karma · joined December 25, 2013

24 Year Old Computer Science student who loves pretty much everything techy. Got my own personal blog if you want to check me out! Elliotforbes.co.uk
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emforce··on Aliasing Your Git Commands for Maximum Developer Efficiency
I learned about git switch through comments for this article on reddit. It's definitely something I'm actively trying to adopt at the moment over my old workflow but it's soo hard to overcome years of muscle memory
emforce··on Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
I can't claim I am either, unfortunately. I required assistance ensuring the certs were in place and my configuration was correct when doing the migration.

And just to clarify, based on some of the articles I've read, I actually think CloudFlare may be a better choice of CDN, this post just highlights one way of achieving a global-scale website and doing it in such a way that it's resilient and cheap as chips!

emforce··on Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
Comparisons were done with CloudFlare on static site, it's been a very long time since the site was based on Laravel and PHP.

I had set Browser Cache Expiration to 1 month within my CloudFlare settings as was luckily screenshotted within a previous article: https://medium.com/@elliot_f/my-journey-into-web-speed-optim...

I'm fairly sure that I had some speed optimizations set within my Nginx server block. Unfortunately, I don't have the Nginx config file to hand anymore as I've (somewhat stupidly) deleted the snapshots without taking a backup.

emforce··on Scaling Your Static Site to a Global Market for a Fraction of the Cost on AWS
I was previously using Cloudflare in conjunction with a Linode server. The disadvantage of this, however, is that you need to ensure that one server never goes down otherwise anyone hitting a cold cache would see the site down.

Also, why do you need a server at all? If you are doing nothing but serving static files then why incur the overhead of maintaining LetsEncrypt certificates and writing Nginx config files? AWS provides a simple interface in which you can view and manage your static files without having to ssh into a server.

On the point of price, I'm predicting my total cost of hosting for a site serving roughly 40-45k users per month will be roughly $7/month. All whilst minimizing the amount of administration time required and monitoring of a more traditional system.

Hope this clarifies this, would be keen to hear any counter thoughts!

emforce··on Serverless Computing in 2018
I believe Unity has ultimately changed the way game developers work on Indie titles though. It's undoubtedly had a huge effect on all levels of indie developers due to its ease of use and the fact it handles a hell of a lot of the complexities for you. Similar to how Serverless does too.

But I appreciate the feedback, it was somewhat hastily written as I was preparing for the new year celebrations haha but I will take this feedback onboard for my next articles!

emforce··on Serverless Computing in 2018
I would be interested in getting more feedback on the article from yourself, what is it you dont feel and I could improve upon? Cheers, Elliot
emforce··on Serverless Computing in 2018
Hi Jacques, I really appreciate your comment!

1. Yeah, there are always going to be situations where low-latency is a must.

2. PaaSes most certainly do, I'm a huge advocate for CloudFoundry usage within my place of work and help onboard people for just this reason. FaaS will simply provide one extra layer of abstraction so that developers won't necessarily have to deal with larger frameworks in situations where it doesn't make sense

3. This is really interesting point of view and I'm inclined to agree with you, there does need to be extensibility that some of these platforms don't currently offer.

P.s. I'm very much looking forward to working with Pivotal's function service offering once it is made available to us!

emforce··on Serverless Computing in 2018
If we look at the likes of Unity3D, nothing was perfect straight off the bat, and I feel like the same can be said of Serverless architectures.

The people offering serverless are no doubt aware of the difficulties and I wouldn't be surprised if they said they were developing something that would make this easier.

Cold starts are a valid issue though and I feel that the effects of this can be minimized with the use of fast compiled languages such as Go.

Lock-in is also a worry for most, as we progress we need to ensure that we are able to write serverless code in such a manner that they can easily be transported across to other serverless providers.

emforce··on An Introduction to Microservice Based Architecture Through Story – Part 2
Re-reading it this morning, I would tend to agree, it's slightly terse and could have done with some more backstory. I'll take this feedback onboard for my next article!

I am new to this style so I am still playing around and seeing what sticks. I do really appreciate your comment!

emforce··on An Introduction to Microservice Based Architecture Through Story – Part 2
I don't believe it would be a case of building your own cloud on top of Amazon, it would be a case of saying something like:

I want 2 instances of my account service, 2 instances of my comic-book viewer service behind a load balancers. You are specifying how you want your application to look as opposed to a fully fledged cloud offering.

I hope this clarifies things!

emforce··on Debunking the Java Performance Myth
Hi All, this has received an incredible amount of views and comments since I posted this and left the house!

I appreciate the feedback comments! I'm very much still playing around with different technologies and writing about them as I go, this is more a learning experience for me that I've documented and I would take what I'm saying with a pinch of salt.

I thought I'd also clarify that I'm using the code/docker images that I created in the previous article as the base from which I'm running my tests as that seems to have gotten missed by a few peeps!

emforce··on Microservices in Java – A Second Look
I believe I addressed this in the 4th paragraph of this article. I can't imagine many teams going back and optimizing their memory usage after they've deployed something to production.

Unless you have capacity in your sprint to do some fine grained optimization of these things you'll most likely be looking at extending the platform or picking up potential feature requests.

But even still, the point still stands whilst not to the same extreme. You have to actually to set this flag in order to reduce 64MB which is still 60+ times the size of a similar Go service and 3-4 times the size of a thin Java/Python application.

emforce··on Show HN: TutorialEdge.net – My hobby tutorial site for Angular 1 and 2 Tutorials
Hi all, if you have the time I would appreciate some critiques on this hobby site that I've been slowly developing for the past 2 years.
emforce··on Some Things I Wish University Had Taught Me – From a Computer Science Student
Projects were typically like a month long for us as well, with some spanning 2 or maybe 3 months.

I don't know I believe that something like TDD should be something that's taught to us from the beginning. In my mind it should essentially be a foundation skill that becomes a platform from which you can grow from. If you are teaching a sorting algorithm then just hedge it into the class that they should split it into x methods and each method should pass test y.

I do agree with your comment on how University should be concentrating on the why but showing good practices along-side the why can't hurt, even if it was just, say bonus marks for using a testing framework or following a style guide etc.

emforce··on Tesla Energy
Is there anyway to model the energy saving costs of these in like a small town?

I mean if power stations only had to produce N/kW/h at a constant rate to power every home in the region then would there be any energy savings? Instead of the typical, scale back at night, boost up during the day system?

If we could calculate the energy usage of every home down to the Watt then surely there wouldn't be any waste?