Technical

This post was partially written by and edited using ChatGPT. Last month the Resolver development team had their first official hack week, which was dedicated to checking out the potential to improve our software with the help of OpenAI. What is OpenAI? You’ve probably heard of OpenAI since their ChatGPT program has made headlines frequently in recent months. According to my assistant editor: OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of a team of experts and researchers in the field of machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, and other related areas. The organization aims to develop advanced artificial intelligence in a safe and beneficial manner to benefit humanity as a whole. They conduct cutting-edge research and also develop various AI-based products and tools such as language models, chatbots, and robotics applications. ChatGPT ...

What is an API? API stands for Application Programming Interface, let’s break that down: Interface - Every device we use has some kind of interface. Your TV has a remote with buttons on it, while a light switch has an even more straightforward interface- on or off. We use these interfaces to get the device to do what we want. Application Programming - The Application Programming bit is easier to understand. An API is how applications talk to each other. All software that you can interact with through code has some form of an API. ...

Have you ever tried to make the download filename of an AWS S3 object be in Korean? No…? Being a developer who, until recently, had only written in English, I hadn’t either. However, it turns out using some UTF-8 characters in S3 object request parameters can lead to some interesting errors. How to Change the Filename of a Download When downloading a file directly from the browser using a HTML anchor tag, the download=<filename> attribute can be used. However, the attribute will only work for same-origin URLs and the blob: and data: schemes. For example: ...

What is ECS? AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fast and popular way to orchestrate containerised applications in AWS’s cloud computing platform. ECS comes with autoscaling baked in and natively runs containers on AWS’s Fargate serverless compute engine. What makes ECS particularly nice to use is that it abstracts away much of the operations management that comes along with rolling your own deployment, either on-site or on cloud-based computing, such as AWS EC2. ...

Introduction Whenever a Ruby on Rails developer hears the phrase “New Rails update!” they will no doubt experience a mixture of excitement and fear. It’s always very exciting to see the new tools that come with a new Rails version and all the new possibilities that go with it. But at the same time, you know that you are bound to have some hiccups with some legacy code or some old gem that you use on your application. Nevertheless, I decided it was time to upgrade our Rails app. ...

What is a Gem? Gems are small chunks of code used to perform specific duties without interfering with, or becoming a direct part of our code. The code required for a gem will still be a part of our project’s ecosystem, but we will ultimately remove some overhead, and avoid unnecessary duplication by using a gem instead of coding it ourselves. Why create a Gem? Gems are a helpful byproduct created when you either have a piece of self contained code, or else when a developer realizes the code might benefit others. If we want to use that code elsewhere or want to share it, that’s when it’s time to make a gem. ...

Awesomplete is a front-end autocomplete tool that compares a user’s input to a defined data list, and if it recognises the input will make suggestions for the user to choose from. We chose to use the Awesomplete tool in the Accord team while building the journey to enable users to create and submit their dispute. Awesomplete provided a neat solution to our problem of how to let the user choose the organisation they are raising a dispute against. The simplest solution would have been a dropdown list of all available organisations. However, as we will be working with ADR providers representing potentially hundreds or thousands of organisations, a dropdown list would not have been a feasible solution. Enter Awesomplete! ...

VPCs are a way of partitioning infrastructure in AWS to isolate them from communication with other infrastructure. They operate at the network level similar to VLANs and block all external communication by default. However, sometimes it is necessary to allow some inter-VPC communication. For example, if you have multiple AWS accounts that need to access some shared service, that will require infrastructure in one VPC to access infrastructure in another VPC. ...

Last time, we looked at building a deployment pipeline using CodePipeline. Given the increasing number of countries that are implementing data residency policies, we now need to be able to deploy a copy of our application in a different region along with its database and connected services at the same time as in the main region (London eu-west-2 in this case). We’ll look at how we can amend our earlier CodePipeline deployment pipeline to deploy the same application image to ECS in two different regions simultaneously. ...

Deployments are a key part of running a web application, but most of the time, they are an afterthought when it comes to process and developer ease-of-use. However, using a number of AWS services, deployments can be made much easier, with most of the process automated. On the Accord ODR project, we use ECS to host our application using Docker containers. Here, I’ll show how GitHub, CodePipeline and ECR (Elastic Container Registry) can be used to create an easy-to-use process that mostly just happens in the background and is very light touch. ...