Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.
DevOps Talks Conference, 2017
A light dew settles on the leaves of the venerable elm trees which track Melbourne’s, St Kilda road. The bulk of the noble Yarra River moves majestically past the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, as it does every morning unaware about what is about to take place within. Light rail service number 96, which I had boarded at the iconic Luna Park, will carry me on my sovereign journey to the DevOps Talks Conference, 2017.
Yet still, those lingering words circle around my mind, like plastic bags caught in the wind, waiting to be sucked into a stormwater drain. Self-doubt is setting in. Am I clearly delusional?
“You’re going to a DevOps conference? Aren’t you a developer?”
This is something I had been asked on more than one occasion in the lead up to this conference. Each time I’m questioned, I point out that the term DevOps is exactly six characters long, and that more or less fifty percent of those characters are “Dev”. I have at least half a right to be here.
Universal Links – A Few Things to be Prepared for
I recently had the opportunity to work for a client who wanted to develop what they termed “app indexing”. What they meant by this was that they wanted their users to be directed into a specific screen of their iPhone app when they tapped on a particular Google search result. Put differently, they wanted the user to feel as if Google had returned search results specifically for their iPhone app.
They also wanted to be able to send out links via email, SMS or other marketing channels. If the app was installed, opening such a link on their phone would result in the user being taken to the relevant points in the iPhone app. If the app wasn’t installed then they would just be taken to the mobile website.
The way this is achieved is through what Apple refer to as “Universal Links”. In this post I’m going to discuss how we implemented Universal Links at a client of ours, some of the obstacles we faced, and how we overcame those obstacles.
Extending React’s container/presentation pattern to share business logic between apps
One of the hottest JavaScript libraries out there right now is React. Whilst there are many good reasons for React being so popular, the main reason my team picked React for our new project is because of the commonality between React and React Native. The concepts and the language are the same, so if you can write React, then you can write React Native. There is also the benefit of being able put both in the same project and then share business logic between them, which is precisely what we need to be able to do.
There are a number of ambitious projects out there that aim to eliminate duplication between platforms by using a common set of React primitives. react-native-web, ReactXP and react-primitives spring to mind. However, these rely on not only a common set of components, but also a common approach to things like styling and animations.
Whilst we wait for the dust to settle on which is the best generic solution to use, my team has come up a simple approach that extends upon a pattern that is already quite well known in the React community. In this post I’ll outline this approach.
TEL monthly newsletter – May 2017
Shine’s TEL group was established in 2011 with the aim of publicising the great technical work that Shine does, and to raise the company’s profile as a technical thought-leader through blogs, local meet up talks, and conference presentations. Each month, the TEL group gather up all the awesome things that Shine folk have been getting up to in and around the community. Here’s the latest roundup from what’s been happening.
To Partition or not to Partition
I have been using BigQuery for over 2 years now at Shine. I’ve found it to be a great tool that is both incredibly fast and able to handle some of our largest workloads. We are processing terabytes of data per day, and each day an extra billion records are added to the store.
But unfortunately this growth is also increasing our costs of running queries. While BigQuery is extremely fast and parallel, it comes at the cost of needing to scan and pay for every record of the columns you are querying. Without the indexes offered by conventional databases, a full table scan is needed for each query. Not only that but when you query large amounts of data the speed of your query slows down:
In this post I’ll talk about how we used table partitions to increase the performance of our queries and avoid query slowdowns.
BigQuery & new users – the top “WTF!?” moments
“What the Fudge?”
I use Google BigQuery a lot. On a daily basis I run dozens of queries, use it to build massively scalable data pipelines for our clients, and regularly help new users navigating it for the first time. Suffice it to say I’m somewhat accustomed to its little quirks. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the new users who are commonly left scratching their heads, and shouting “What the fudge!?” at their monitors.
Here’s the top three WTFs that I regularly hear from new BigQuery users:
A post Google I/O 2017 conversation with Google Home
OK Google, generate a clickbait title for my Google I/O 2017 blog post
I’ve generated a title, Gareth. What would you like to add next?
OK Google, I’m a bit jet lagged – remind me what I saw at Google I/O 2017
I would love to help, Gareth, but I’m going to need a little more information. Would you like that information in chronological order, or grouped by topic?
Ampersand.js
Ampersand.js was created by the good people at &yet. It is based on Backbone.js, and refers to itself as a ‘non-frameworky framework’. In a world where Javascript frontend frameworks abound, it can be difficult to choose ‘the best’ one for your project. Most of the time you would go with that which was used before, which is the most popular, or which is most familiar. In 2015 I found myself in a position where a series of small, discrete, single-purpose, front-end ‘widgets’ were proposed. The small development team was able to choose what we wanted, and Ampersand.js was selected. In this post I’ll talk about why I like using it for our projects, and what I think makes a good framework in general.
Beam me up Google – porting your Dataflow applications to 2.x
Will this post interest me?
If you use (or intend to use) Google Cloud Dataflow, you’ve heard about Apache Beam, or if you’re simply bored in work today and looking to waste some time, then yes, please do read on. This short post will cover why our team finally took the plunge to start porting some of Dataflow applications (using the 1.x Java SDKs) to the new Apache Beam model (2.x Java SDK). Spoiler – it has something to do with this. It will also highlight the biggest changes we needed to make when making the switch (pretty much just fix some compile errors).
