Scheduled jobs (or Cron jobs) are a standard part of web development. Whether you want to update comment counts every night or check for updates once a week, a scheduled job allows you to “set and forget”. There are a number of methods to implement scheduled jobs. Some rudimentary web apps check the schedule each […]
Category: Technical
Security Groups are a best practice feature of VPCs in AWS that act similar to a firewall. They allow access to various resources such as EC2 instances, load balancers or RDS databases to be controlled to other resources or a set of IP addresses. For example, you may set up an EC2 instance to only […]
I recently started working on a ticket where I was asked to add a new mail template and the logic behind it. I have not really worked with either Mandrill or Mailchimp much before, so I started doing research into how to do this. Every blog post and Stack Overflow post that I could find […]
One of the best ways of working out who is how many people are visiting your site, see patterns of traffic and analyse them over time is to look at your access logs. Most web servers collect some form of access logs, mostly in a standard format such as the Common Log Format. As a CDN, […]
If you have an app that accepts file uploads, then either you’re aware of the potential risks, or you should be. With Accord ODR, we started by limiting the types of files that can be uploaded by users. This is the easy part: disallow executable files or anything else that can be scripted. This includes […]
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Using VCR in tests
VCR is a gem that is super helpful if your Ruby application is using an external API. When testing, if an actual API is called, this will result in slow test performance. Although a single test may not seem that slow when run individually, the impact of using many API calls in tests will significantly […]
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CI using GitHub and AWS CodeBuild
Last time, we mentioned CI as one of things that we try to automate as much as possible. This time, we’ll go through more details about our CI setup and how it relates to our deployment pipeline. Setting up the CodeBuild project As well as being used as part of a CodePipeline, CodeBuild can also […]
At Resolver, we aim to automate as much of the boring technical jobs as possible, and that includes the whole continuous integration (CI) and deployment pipeline. We trigger these from GitHub, so a mere push or merge can kick-off our automated test suite or deploy to our staging environment for more automated and manual testing. […]
One of the tenets of modern framework-based web development is the management of your database state in code. Rather like infrastructure-as-code, it means there is an immutable history of the state of the application database at any point in time, which can be re-applied or rolled back as necessary. In addition, the desired state of […]
On 17th June 2020 I attended my first AWS summit. New to the industry, it was one of the first tech conferences I’d been to (other than the Women in Development conference earlier this year, back in that beautiful time when people were allowed to meet in groups…) and was certainly the first virtual online […]