Written on
November 6, 2014
by
Shay Howe
A few weeks back I tweeted a bit of CSS I’ve been using frequently and was quite surprised by the response, thus I wanted to share it here too. What was the bit of CSS? Simply enough, it was the following selector:
Often when working with lists we want to apply a specific style to all of the li elements in a list except for one, most commonly the first or last li element. In the past we’ve been known to write the following CSS:
1
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6 | li {
border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
}
li:last-child {
border: none;
}
|
The problem here is that we’ve defined styles only to overwrite them later by way of a higher specificity selector, in this case by adding the :last-child pseudo-class. In doing so we create extra work for the browser and slow down the rendering of these styles. Continue…
Written on
October 30, 2014
by
Shane Sveller
We are investing a lot of research and development time into leveraging Docker in the next generation of our internal infrastructure. One of the next components we need to build out to full maturity is being able to dynamically route web traffic from our Nginx load balancers to internal Docker containers in a performant way.
We are very passionate fans of the work of HashiCorp at Belly, and they recently published a new project named Consul Template. We were using an earlier HashiCorp tool named consul–haproxy to reconfigure our Nginx load–balancers based on Consul data. Consul Template is a slightly more generalized tool that was fairly smooth to adopt.
Let me walk you through a proof of concept I whipped up last week. Starting from an OSX computer with Homebrew and VirtualBox installed, we will be able to spin up a Docker–based environment that will load–balance HTTP traffic via Nginx to an arbitrary number of backend processes, all running in separate Docker containers. Continue…
Written on
September 26, 2014
by
Jay O’Connor
Docker is neat. If you don’t know it yet, you should read this now.
How we build
We’re using a cluster of machines specifically setup to build Docker images. The build happens by cloning a repo, then sending it to Docker to build. This leads us to a problem.
When a git repo is cloned, the mtime (modification timestamp) on the filesystem is the time of the clone, not the friendly time that you see in Github (which is based on the last commit). Docker uses the file’s mtime to determine whether or not something has been changed, so NOTHING of yours gets cached in Docker’s slices. There’s a solution, however…
Continue…
Written on
August 25, 2014
by
Shaker Islam
How many times have you had this nightmare:
“Hey, something’s broken. We need it fixed.”
“… but I’m working on something already,” you reply.
“Haha, hilarious. Developers are funny people with social influence.”
“Just kidding. Fix this right now.”
Continue…
Written on
August 20, 2014
by
Clark Kampfe
At Belly we make heavy use of Napa for all things API. Napa is our in–house, open source framework that makes it easy to create REST APIs in Ruby, and it forms the backbone of our application services layer.
Why we love Napa:
- Productivity: Being a Ruby framework, Napa bundles Rubyland mainstays like ActiveRecord and RSpec with built–in code generators to quickly get a service up and running. It is easy to configure, and quick to learn for newcomers.
- Predictable: Napa is our de facto standard. We use it across our services layer, so it is easy to jump from one service to another without context switching.
Being built on Ruby, Napa is easy to learn and incredibly productive. Though like other Ruby–based projects, it does inherit some of Ruby’s warts: lackluster performance when parsing large objects or manipulating large data, and arguably more annoying, its reliance on run time exceptions instead of compiler errors for things like type errors, arity mismatches, or unwittingly referencing nil values instead of objects.
In practical terms these equate to slow response times for service consumers and wasted developer time tracking down pesky bugs.
What if we could take the things we love about Napa and Ruby — speed of development, active community, project predictability and standardization — and supplement them with snappy run time performance and a type system that augments our automated testing to reduce bugs in production? Continue…
Written on
June 24, 2014
by
Clark Kampfe
Greetings, fellow travelers. Clark Kampfe here, pleased to meet you.
In a previous life, I wasn’t a developer. I was a photojournalist in the
North African country of Tunisia! Then I went to Dev Bootcamp, met and learned
with some great people, and wrote a ton of code.
Now, I’m coming to you as a Junior Engineer at Belly hacking in Ruby,
JavaScript, and whatever else they’ll let me get away with!
If you’re thinking about starting down the path to building your own computer
creations, here’s a few observations from someone who was in your shoes a little
over a year ago:
Writing is a Core Competency
While programming may ultimately be about the code, other tasks
consume a greater portion of most developers’ time: maintaining documentation,
designing program architecture, reviewing others’ code, and communicating with
one’s team.
All of these tasks have one thing in common: they forego writing code for writing
prose. If you are uncomfortable reading and writing enormous amounts of non-code
text… you’re gonna have a bad time. Continue…
