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Kubernetes Data Simplicity: Getting Started With K8ssandra

You might have heard about the K8ssandra project and want to start contributing, or maybe you want to start using all of its features. If you aren’t familiar with K8ssandra (pronounced like “Kate Sandra”), you can read this overview before digging into the developer activities in this post.

In a nutshell, K8ssandra is an open-source distribution of Apache Cassandra™ for Kubernetes, which includes a rich set of trusted open-source services and tooling. K8ssandra comes with handy features that are baked-in and pluggable, which allows for flexible deployment and configuration.

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Easily Format Markdown Files in VS Code

Every respectable software project needs a README. This file provides crucial information about what the project is, how to work with it, and other relevant information for developers. README files are written in markdown, a special markup syntax. The syntax for markdown is simple enough, but it can be a pain to manually type out, and it’s easy to make simple mistakes and typos.

Wouldn’t you like to just use the Cmd+B keyboard shortcut to bold some text instead of typing ** around your text? Or what about creating a nicely formatted table in your README, especially when editing an existing table? Wouldn’t it be nice if the table formatting and column width adjustments were taken care of for us? Markdown is wonderful, but it’s not exactly as easy as working with a Google doc when applying formatting.

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How to Configure VS Code for Java

I recently shifted from IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate to Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and I have no regrets! VS Code is highly customizable and fast. It stores your settings in the cloud so you don’t have to worry about configurations when you move to a different machine.

As expected, it has support for Java, Git, SQL, Spring Boot, and many other languages, frameworks, and tools.

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How to Start Visual Studio Code Extension Development

Most developers have used Visual Studio Code at some point in their careers. It has been voted the most popular IDE of 2021 by respondents of the StackOverflow developer survey, and its appeal is clear as ever. While the base program provides a framework for an IDE, all of the language support and special features are delivered as extensions, which makes it easy to extend and customize your installation. So inevitably, there comes a point where you want to write your own extension. This guide will walk you through the basics of getting started with Visual Studio (VS) Code extension development.

What Is a VS Code Extension?

Before we jump into coding, we should clear up what a VS Code extension is on a technical level. Extensions are basically programs, written in JavaScript or TypeScript, which hook into various parts of VS Code. They provide functions for VS Code to call when certain events happen, and can programmatically interact with (some parts of) VS Code in those functions.

Extensions are distributed as ZIP files with a specific file and folder structure inside. The files contained in this structure are usually very verbose and not friendly for humans to read or write so there’s an official build tool to generate such ZIP files from source code: vsce. Its usage will be explained later on in this post.

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3 Best Tactics To Prevent Technical Debt as an Engineer

The expression technical debt gets thrown around a lot and every Engineer knows that it slows down the development process. In this article, I want to give practical advice that your engineering team can manage and solve technical debt without spending a lifetime on it.

Let’s Define Technical Debt...

Often technical debt refers to a rushed development process or a lack of shared knowledge among team members. However, don't forget that in many cases technical debt is inevitable and is part of a normal software development process.

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10 Must-Know Patterns for Writing Clean Code With React and Typescript

Introduction 

React is a JavaScript library, and it is the most popular and industry-leading frontend development library today. JavaScript is a loosely typed language, and as a result, it catches runtime. The result of this is that JavaScript errors are caught very late and this can lead to nasty bugs. As a JavaScript library, React inherits this problem.

Clean code is a consistent style of programming that makes your code easier to write, read, and maintain. Anyone can write code that a computer can understand but good developers write clean code – code that humans can understand. Clean code is a reader-focused development style that improves our software quality and maintainability.

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Top 5 Git Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Workflow

Becoming a Git power user is on the bucket list of every developer. Here are five Git tips that will help you level up your workflow and bring you one step closer to Git mastery.

Tip #1: Modify the Previous Commit Without Changing the Commit Message

You’ve just committed your changes on your local copy with a detailed and thought-through message, but the moment you hit RETURN, you realize you forgot to add that one change that really belongs there. If only there was a way to update the previous commit instead of creating a new one…

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The Best VS Code Extensions for Remote Work

Programming is a team sport and without proper communication, you can’t really expect spectacular results. A remote setup can make developer-to-developer communication challenging, but equipped with the right tools you have nothing to fear. 

Let’s take a look at the best VS Code extensions that can seriously improve your remote working routine.

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Coding and Testing Linux Applications on Windows Using WSL and VS Code

In this article, I will share my experience of using Windows Subsystem for Linux along with Visual Studio Code for some basic coding and testing in C++ and Java. While I will be using some of the examples from the Refinitiv Real-time SDKs,  the notes below should be applicable to general C++ and Java development.

I will start with:

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10 Must-Have VS Code Extensions to Improve Your Productivity

1. Live Server

Live Server allows you to see code changes reflected in the browser. It launches a local development server with a live reload feature both for static and dynamic pages.

Every time you save your code, you'll instantly see the changes reflected in the browser. You'll be much faster at spotting errors and it's much easier to do some quick experiments with your code.

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Developer Tooling for Kubernetes in 2021: IntelliJ, VSCode, Gitpod, and Lens (Part 3)

Over the last few days, I have been hard at work writing an up-to-date comparison of Kubernetes tooling (check out the first and second posts if you haven’t already, which cover tools that help you reproduce issues locally). Going through the sprawling Kubernetes ecosystem and curating the knowledge that would be the most interesting to fellow developers and engineering managers has been no small task. That’s why section 3 will cover the heart of cloud-native development: the IDE.

Some of the questions I have been struggling with have been:

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Remote Pair Programming with Visual Studio Code and Live Share

Remote work has killed pair programming. Or has it? If anything, it certainly presents an interesting challenge for pair programming when the two developers involved are no longer sitting side by side in the same room. But can you still successfully pair program in this world of remote work?

In this article, we'll look at some of the benefits of pair programming and how you can use technology like the Visual Studio Code Live Share extension to continue to pair program remotely with your colleagues.

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Debugging Go Microservices in Kubernetes With VScode

Many organizations adopt cloud native development practices with the dream of shipping features faster. Although the technologies and architectures may change when moving to the cloud, the fact that we all still add the occasional bug to our code remains constant. The snag is that many of your existing local debugging tools and practices can’t be used when everything is running in a container or on the cloud.

Easy and efficient debugging is essential to being a productive engineer, but when you have a large number of microservices running in Kubernetes the approach you take to debugging has to change. For one, you typically can’t run all of your dependent services on your local machine. This then opens up the challenges of remote debugging (and the associated fiddling with debug modes and exposing ports correctly). However, there is another way. And the CNCF Telepresence tool enables this path.

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Deploying Salesforce and Heroku Apps with Ease

This is the 12th article documenting what I’ve learned from a series of 13 Trailhead Live video sessions on Modern App Development on Salesforce and Heroku.  In these articles, we’re focusing on how to combine Salesforce with Heroku to build an “eCars” app—a sales and service application for a fictitious electric car company (“Pulsar”).  eCars allows users to customize and buy cars, service techs to view live diagnostic info from the car, and more. In case you missed my previous article, you can find it here.

Just as a quick reminder:  I’ve been following this Trailhead Live video series to brush up and stay current on the latest app development trends on these platforms that are key for my career and business.  I’ll be sharing each step for building the app, what I’ve learned, and my thoughts from each session.  These series reviews are both for my own edification as well as for others who might benefit from this content.

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VS Code Extension: Ngrok for VS Code

Over the Easter weekend, a four-day weekend characterized by lockdowns all over the world, I decided to use the extra time I had at home to start a new project and learn a new skill. By the end of the weekend, I was proud to release my first VSCode extension: ngrok for VSCode.

What’s That?

ngrok is a command-line tool built by Alan Shreve that you can use to expose your localhost server with a publicly available URL. It’s great for sharing access to an application running on your own machine, testing web applications on mobile devices, or testing webhook integrations. For example, I’m a big fan of using ngrok to test my webhooks when I am working with Twilio applications.

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Cheapskate’s Journey to On-Demand Load Tests on Heroku With Locust

I want to stretch every dollar that I spend on the cloud. I run a handful of web applications on Heroku, and like everyone else, run a suite of smoke tests and load tests on every release increment in a non-production environment. Load tests are important: they help us not only to understand the limits of our systems but also bring up issues that arise due to concurrency, which often escape the realms of unit tests and integration tests. But since we run the tests often, we don’t want to pay a lot of money every time the tests run.

In this article, I’ll show you how to set up cost-effective load tests. We’ll use Locust to make the testing robust and Heroku to make running the tests easy and cost-effective. I’ll also show how you can use VS Code and Docker for development without installing dev dependencies on your system.