Articles
Group management microservice
As a graph database Neo4J is a great choice to manage highly relational data. On the other side, a great number of applications feature at least some form of user management system. With Neo4J, those users can be store as nodes and connected to other items via relationships. A typical example would be a blog, where both articles and users are individual nodes while authorships are represented by a relationship.
Group and User Pickers
With the user management and group management microservices, users and their groups can be easily queried through HTTP requests. However, the GUI that the user interacts with must also be properly designed so as to provide an optimal UX. To facilitate the query of users via the GUI, I designed a group and user picker component for Vue.js that can be easily installed using NPM.
Image upload microservice
An image is worth a thousand words and probably even more if comparing their size in bytes. When designing my CMS, I originally intended to store images directly in the article, encoded in Base64. However, this would considerably increase the size of each article, making the whole CMS slow.
Wardrobe and outfits management web app
Have you ever bought a piece of clothing only to come home and realize you already had a similar one in your wardrobe? This happened to me the other day so I decided to fix the problem. To do so, I designed a simple web application in which the user can keep track of all the garments they own.
MQTT control dashboard
With the cloud native multi-user MQTT platform deployed, I started designing IoT devices that I could distribute to end users. However, without a GUI, interacting with those devices would be difficult. Of course, one could install applications like MQTT dash or similar but this would require tedious configuration such as MQTT broker and topics. I wanted to give users a simpler UX so I made this simple control interface that automatically displays a users devices and allows those to be controlled.
APIs: Why and how
From a simplistic point of view, software can be seen as a combination of operations performed on data. Data comes in, gets processed through a series of functions and some result comes out.
TDD for an Express application
TDD has been proven to significantly reduce the amount of bugs in software releases. Moreover, with CI/CD systems, tests can be run automatically before the application deployment, preventing a faulty application to reach its end user. This guide goes through the steps required to set up a TDD workflow with an Express application.
RESTful API design
There are four main kind of operations when working with a database: Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD). However, databases are usually not exposed directly to the clients. Instead, those operations are performed by a server side application with a client-facing API. The most common type of APIs nowadays are based on HTTP. An HTTP API can be built with complete freedom. However, guidelines for best-practice HTTP API design have been created. An API following those guidlines is called a REST (or RESTful) API.
HTML basics
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is used to describe the content of a webpage to web browsers. Originally, web browsers were designed to display text documents and so HTML was used to define the various parts making up those documents.
CSS basics
HTML defines the content of a web page but not its aesthetics. Styling a document is achieved using CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is another language that web browsers can interpret.