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 […]
Category: Technical
Talking robots! Let’s talk about APIs
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 […]
AWS S3 UTF-8 Content Disposition
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 […]
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 […]
Upgrading to Rails 6.0
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Setting up VPC peering
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]