Richard Clayton

Update - March 2, 2018

Hello friends! If you follow my blog you will have noticed that I haven't really posted any content in a long time (sorry). The reason is that I was extraordinarily busy for the last 2.5 years designing and building a complex microservice architecture at work (and pouring my soul into the endeavor).

Over the course of that . . .

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March 02, 2018

Serverless isn't Effortless

Lessons we learned in our first serious Serverless project.

I've been working on a fairly substantial Serverless project over the last week and I wanted to offer some thoughts to developers considering Lambda-styled infrastructure.

Usually when I say "Serverless", I mean the architectural style of using Lambdas on hosted infrastructure and not the Serverless project. I will . . .

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October 26, 2017

10 Things I learned Working Remotely

Tips for Professionals thinking about making a go of the remote lifestyle.

There are a lot of misconceptions about working remotely. Many people think it's the ultimate way to liberate themselves from the confines of a traditional office -- with their new found freedom they will be able to dictate their own hours, be location independent, and perhaps work less.

In practice, however, I've come to . . .

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April 10, 2017

Speaking Intelligently about "Java vs Node" Performance

Please understand what's really important when it comes to the benefits of a platform.

TL;DR:

Unless you know the differences in the process and concurrency models of Java and Node, don't write a benchmark comparing the two. It will be silly to those who know the difference and misleading to those who don't.

For those deciding between the two platforms understand that performance isn't the only . . .

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March 14, 2016

The First 5 Imports

Essential Node/JavaScript Libraries I Can't Live With Out.

When I start a new JavaScript project, it's not uncommon that my first three imports are:

npm install --save lodash async moment

In fact, I find these three libraries so essential, I don't think you'll find a single project I've touched without them. Each library satisfies what I consider a general short coming in . . .

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February 24, 2016

Web Proxy Using Nginx and Docker

Need SSL or Basic Auth? Standup a proxy in less than 5 minutes using Nginx and Docker.

I needed to secure (basic auth) a mongo-express instance last night and this little trick with Docker and Nginx blew me away (with how simple it was).

This tutorial assumes you have Docker installed (on Amazon Linux it's as simple as sudo yum install -y docker).

1. Generate a password file:

You will need to have . . .

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October 06, 2015

Do you really need a UUID/GUID?

The architectural consequences of using UUID/GUID's may outweigh their benefits.

For the purpose of this post, I will use UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) to mean both UUID and GUID (Globally Unique Identifier, Microsoft's implementation of UUID).

I've been thinking a lot about UUID's lately. The system I've inherited at work is plagued by their usage. To many developers, the UUID . . .

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January 11, 2015

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