Category: Languages, Tools & Frameworks

Twenty years ago I worked for a bank converting Clipper 5 code into Visual Basic as part of Y2K migrations.  I was young and impressionable and I remember my manager said to me, “If something is getting too complex, there’s probably a better way!” Complexity can be a significant barrier for developers considering a new…

What are Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)? With the widespread adoption of HTML5 standards, the lines between native and web applications are becoming more blurry. Now, increasing native features have become available for the browsers, making it difficult to decide whether to build a native or web application. Here at NearForm we love pushing the boundaries…

One of the standard infrastructure architectural patterns for web applications – that we also apply here at NearForm – is to split the infrastructure into multiple logical environments. The most common ones are dev, staging and production. They use the same type of resources (load balancers, instances, databases, etc), but they differ in scale and…

In a previous article, we described how to build a Docker Registry. Today we look at Clair – a tool that does static analysis of vulnerabilities in a docker image. What is Clair? Clair is a popular open source vulnerability scanning solution for docker images made by CoreOS. Clair is also integrated with quay.io public…

This year we are really excited to launch the NodeConf EU App! We have put together a Progressive Web App (PWA) to enhance the NodeConf.EU conference attendance experience. The application is built with two users in mind – the conference attendees and the conference organisers. It is designed to help bridge the gap between both of these…

Using Emscripten to compile a WebAssembly version of Cephes, we finally have a fast and correct implementation of most mathematical special functions.

Structuring Data Using Structs When writing native modules in C/C++, it is often useful to structure data using something called structs. A struct is a low level data schema you can use in C/C++. They basically act as an encoding/decoding scheme, similar to protocol-buffers and many others data encoding schemes, to read/write the properties specified…

Open source can be a thrilling hobby. My own contributions include projects like an IoT & Robotics framework and a Microservices framework, to name a few. The breadth and variance of open source mean that anyone with a text editor, terminal, and an internet connection can help build some really cool things with really cool people. Tools of…

Re-joi-ce people! If you have been programming long enough, you know all too well that you can never trust external data. The first thing you will want to do is validate that data before it gets too deep into your program. You may have already heard the saying “don’t roll your own crypto”. Though less…

There are many ways to install Node.js, from operating system package managers to single version installers; you can even download and build from source! Unfortunately, the vast majority of installations can put Node.js in a location that requires the need for elevated permissions when using either the node or npm commands on the command line or…