Rapid frontend development with GraphQL

As frontend development gets more complex, I see more and more organizations moving to a model where frontend and backend are implemented by different teams. (another nice example of reverse Conway’s law).

Most of these backends are exposed through REST APIs. This leads to the problem that frontend teams that are using the APIs have to wait for the backend team to complete the development of their APIs. The backend team becomes the bottleneck and causes slowness in development for the frontend team.

Let’s bring GraphQL into the mix…

In the GraphQL world, there is a different approach. The frontend and backend teams can develop in parallel, without stalling the development. The frontend teams can work with mock versions of the API, and use libraries like GraphQL Faker to create fake data. Coding can be completely done with mock data and tests can be written too.

I know that in theory a similar approach would be feasible with REST APIs but these APIs tend to be more static by nature. One GraphQL endpoint can handle a multitude of clients each with their own requirements. It is really hard to have the same flexibility with a REST API, most of them are either too generic(what leads to overfetching) or too specific(what leads to underfetching).

More information: https://www.howtographql.com/basics/1-graphql-is-the-better-rest/

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

The art of simplicity

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