Day: May 3, 2016

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Ever wonder how a big site like Stack Overflow handles code deployment?

We’ve talked about Stack Overflow’s architecture and the hardware behind it. The next most requested topic was Deployment. How do we get code a developer (or some random stranger) writes into production? Let’s break it down. Keep in mind that we’re talking about deploying Stack Overflow for the example, but most of our projects follow almost an identical pattern to deploy a website or a service.

Source: Nick Craver – Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment – 2016 Edition

Fascinating look into how Stack Overflow code gets from a developers workstation to production servers. There are many good ideas about development workflow in here.

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Experimenting with the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat | Opensource.com


The Opensource.com team has been fascinated by the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT, a low-cost addon for the Raspberry Pi that enables astronauts and citizen scientists alike to easily collect measurements from a variety of sensors to conduct science experiments or just have fun. So we decided to try one out ourselves. We grabbed a side room at our offices in Red Hat Tower and spent an hour or two learning what it can do. First step, attaching the device. Easy enough!

Source: Experimenting with the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat | Opensource.com

Fun things to do with your RPi.

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Use npm shrinkwrap to manage dependencies in your node app

The reason to use npm’s shrinkwrap feature is that, while you can fix the versions of your direct dependencies in your package.json, you can’t fix the versions of their dependencies, which may be quite loosely specified. This means that if you or someone else rebuilds the image at some future time, you can’t guarantee (without using shrinkwrap) that it won’t pull down a different version of some indirect dependency, breaking your app. This seems to happen to me much more often than one might expect, so I advocate using shrinkwrap. If you are familiar with ruby’s excellent bundler dependency manager, npm-shrinkwrap.json is much like Gemfile.lock.

Source: Lessons from Building a Node App in Docker

Dependencies in the node ecosystem can be a real pain in the ass. Some relief can be had by using npm shrinkwrap to manage the dependencies of your dependencies.