First thing developers learn when to speed up applications is to use some form of caching. The art of storing information for later lookup and use. You can liken it to looking up a phone number for a pizza place, and then writing that phone number down on a piece of paper.

Let us be real, these days in order to make the frontend application running in the browser there are a lot of things to take into consideration and juggle around. Like state management, CSS itself is so complex these days with layouts, effects and animations. Then there is just the normal logic of clicking a button does action Y. Coupled with actually consuming the APIs for the data in question and binding that to elements in the UI. This just touches on what the application should do, in addition to all this there are packing tools, linters, test frameworks and overall structure of the codebase to manage and learn as well. Suffice it to say the ecosystem for current modern frontend development work is quite something alright.

I recently watched Escape from Pretoria. This is a great movie. It contained so many elements that I could link to software development funnily enough. The premise of the movie simply said is the escape of two real characters and one fictional one. Potential spoilers ahead.

Back in the day of mainframes and the like, there was a need for a technician that did maintenance on the computers in question. Just like you have need for mechanics that do the maintenance and the fixing of your automobiles. This grew out into a full time position called system administrator or sysadmin. So then came the containerised era and the whole DevOps movement.

So I recently started using Spring WebFlux and Project Reactor as stated in this post. One more thing I came across as I was debugging why a certain job was not running was that if you do not catch all exceptions and do not have a doOnError statement it will just keep that thought hidden from you and all to itself.

Recently I got the experience of using Docker on Windows Server to actually deploy a production running service. It was a fun experience for sure. I ran into three things that made it worthwhile to write down for posterity.

I recently ran into the unsolvable issue that if you ran an npm audit on a React or Angular framework project, it would give back an error because of this CVE. Now the solution was to go to a lower dependency for one of the scripts, but that lower dependency had other high vulnerabilities and so you were in an endless cycle and could not fix it.

I recently skimmed / read this article. It is written by someone who has 25 years of experience in the field and 18 of those at Microsoft and currently operates as a Software Architect. It is not always relevant, but in this case I found it to be so.

I wrote a piece on microservices and nanoservices and how that is not the way to move forward.

Speaking of learning the basic tools, I think I learned enough of running docker on multiple platforms that I now have a nice setup that is the perfect Docker image that fits as a very perfect boilerplate template to create all your future images with.