EP115: Life is Short, Use Dev Tools

This week’s system design refresher:

• KISS, SOLID, CAP, BASE: Important Terms You Might Not Know! (Youtube video)

• Life is Short, Use Dev Tools

• 10 Essential Components of a Production Web Application

• How to load your websites at lightning speed

• Top 8 Standards Every Developer Should Know

• SPONSOR US

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KISS, SOLID, CAP, BASE: Important Terms You Might Not Know!

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Life is Short, Use Dev Tools

The right dev tool can save you precious time, energy, and perhaps the weekend as well.

Here are our favorite dev tools:

1. Development Environment
   A good local dev environment is a force multiplier. Powerful IDEs like VSCode, IntelliJ IDEA, Notepad++, Vim, PyCharm & Jupyter Notebook can make your life easy.
   

2. Diagramming
   Showcase your ideas visually with diagramming tools like DrawIO, Excalidraw, mindmap, Mermaid, PlantUML, Microsoft Visio, and Miro
   

3. AI Tools
   AI can boost your productivity. Don’t ignore tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, Claude, Ollama, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.
   

4. Hosting and Deployment
   For hosting your applications, explore solutions like AWS, Cloudflare, GitHub, Fly, Heroku, and Digital Ocean.
   

5. Code Quality
   Quality code is a great differentiator. Leverage tools like Jest, ESLint, Selenium, SonarQube, FindBugs, and Checkstyle to ensure top-notch quality.
   

6. Security
   Don’t ignore the security aspects and use solutions like 1Password, LastPass, OWASP, Snyk, and Nmap.
   

7. Note-taking
   Your notes are a reflection of your knowledge. Streamline your note-taking with Notion, Markdown, Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, and Tiddly Wiki.
   

8. Design
   Elevate your visual game with design tools like Figma, Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Canva, and Adobe Photoshop.
   

Over to you: Which dev tools do you use?

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10 Essential Components of a Production Web Application

1. It all starts with CI/CD pipelines that deploy code to the server instances. Tools like Jenkins and GitHub help over here.

2. The user requests originate from the web browser. After DNS resolution, the requests reach the app servers.

3. Load balancers and reverse proxies (such as Nginx & HAProxy) distribute user requests evenly across the web application servers.

4. The requests can also be served by a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

5. The web app communicates with backend services via APIs.

6. The backend services interact with database servers or distributed caches to provide the data.

7. Resource-intensive and long-running tasks are sent to job workers using a job queue.

8. The full-text search service supports the search functionality. Tools like Elasticsearch and Apache Solr can help here.

9. Monitoring tools (such as Sentry, Grafana, and Prometheus) store logs and help analyze data to ensure everything works fine.

10. In case of issues, alerting services notify developers through platforms like Slack for quick resolution.

Over to you: What other components would you add to the architecture of a production web app?

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How to load your websites at lightning speed?

Check out these 8 tips to boost frontend performance:

1. Compression
   Compress files and minimize data size before transmission to reduce network load.

2. Selective Rendering/Windowing
   Display only visible elements to optimize rendering performance. For example, in a dynamic list, only render visible items.
   

3. Modular Architecture with Code Splitting
   Split a bigger application bundle into multiple smaller bundles for efficient loading.
   

4. Priority-Based Loading
   Prioritize essential resources and visible (or above-the-fold) content for a better user experience.
   

5. Pre-loading
   Fetch resources in advance before they are requested to improve loading speed.
   

6. Tree Shaking or Dead Code Removal
   Optimize the final JS bundle by removing dead code that will never be used.
   

7. Pre-fetching
   Proactively fetch or cache resources that are likely to be needed soon.
   

8. Dynamic Imports
   Load code modules dynamically based on user actions to optimize the initial loading times.

Over to you: What other frontend performance tips would you add to this cheat sheet?

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Top 8 Standards Every Developer Should Know

• TCP/IP
  Developed by the IETF organization, the TCP/IP protocol is the foundation of the Internet and one of the best-known networking standards.
  

• HTTP
  The IETF has also developed the HTTP protocol, which is essential for all web developers.
  

• SQL
  Structured Query Language (SQL) is a domain-specific language used to manage data.
  

• OAuth
  OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard for access delegation commonly used to grant websites or applications limited access to user information without exposing their passwords.
  

• HTML/CSS
  With HTML, web pages are rendered uniformly across browsers, which reduces development effort spent on compatibility issues.HTML tags.
  
  CSS standards are often used in conjunction with HTML.
  

• ECMAScript
  ECMAScript is a standardized scripting language specification that serves as the foundation for several programming languages, the most well-known being JavaScript.
  

• ISO Date
  It is common for developers to have problems with inconsistent time formats on a daily basis. ISO 8601 is a date and time format standard developed by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) to provide a common format for exchanging date and time data across borders, cultures, and industries.
  

• OpenAPI
  OpenAPI, also known as the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), is a standardized format for describing and documenting RESTful APIs.

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