about me

Software developer, Londoner, climber, Nintendo fanboy. My recent work has revolved around building back-end services for e-commerce companies.

I wish to broaden my knowledge of modern software development as I feel whatever your area of specialty is, front-end, back-end, DevOps, it's important to appreciate the entire landscape.

A couple of quotes that have inspired me to learn:

"If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." - Motoko Kusanagi

“If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.” - Albert Einstein

Unless I can explain what I've been learning, I can't be sure I understand it myself. Anyone can follow a tutorial to the letter to implement something. Hence the creation of this blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Comparing REST and GraphQL

Image
This article will compare REST with the lesser known  GraphQL  style APIs. What is a REST API? REST (Representational State Transfer) is a client-server architecture style centred around resources and the state transitions can go through. A resource is named and located via a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) . Usually, the HTTP transport protocol is used which give access to the standard HTTP methods/verbs allowing CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations to be performed on the resources. The accepted CRUD operation to HTTP verb mappings can be found here .   For instance: curl -X GET http://api.com/users/1/photos/1 -H 'Content-Type: application/json' In the above example, the HTTP verb GET is used to indicate a read operation, the Content-Type:  application/JSON header indicates the desired representation. There are many more REST architectural constraints which would make an API truly RESTful but this is the general minimal you'll...
Read more

Comparing the execution model of Spring Boot, Akka and NodeJs

Image
There are many technologies to choose from for implementing a backend service and it's not immediately obvious which to choose. This article will compare the execution model of a few popular technologies, which is one of the key points to consider. Note I chose a rather vague term "technologies" as each technology describe themselves differently, framework, toolkit, runtime etc. "technologies" felt apt. To illustrate the differences I have implemented the same simple service in each of the technologies under consideration. These are Spring Boot 1.5.x  [1] , NodeJs  [2] , Spring Boot 2.x  [3] and Akka  [4] .The service contains a single '/books' endpoint that retrieves data from a Mongo DB. Spring Boot 1.5.x Spring Boot 1.5.x has one-thread-per-client-request execution module, synchronous and blocking. The following sequences of steps occur when the service  [1]  receives a client request `curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/boo...
Read more