Blog Posts

While I am a big fan of automated tests and TDD, I have seen code bases that were unnecessarily difficult to change, because of sub-optimal tests. The following list contains the 7 most common problems I have seen in such test suites.

While DynamoDB does not directly support join operations like a relational database, we are still able to model relations and to perform complex queries on them via a single-table design.

At the date of writing this, the second edition (and a very different book from the first edition) of *Serverless Architectures on AWS* has been around for less than six months, and there are hardly any reviews about this to be found. Therefore, this post summarizes the book parts of the book and presents what I liked and disliked about the chapter. In the end, I will give a short verdict on the book.

AWS currently offers over 200 different fully-featured services, but not all of them are serverless. How can we tell whether a service is serverless or not?

In this post, we'll have a look at a resource-intensive application that was initially written in a monolithic fashion, how the system was migrated to cloud-native architecture and what benefits this provides.

Let's take a look at a rather unconvential code quality hack. Zoom out of the file, are the methods in your code well formed? Are there any visual patterns that indicate code smells?

In recent years Microservices were all the rage and everyone wanted to build their application in a microservice style. But why? What are the actual goals of this architectural style? Let's have a look.

Where do you start on AWS? Which are the core services you really need to know? Let's look at an example application and EC2, RDS & S3.

Cumulative Layout Shift is probably the most important core web vital from a user experience point of view. What is it and what causes CLS? Let's have a closer look.

First Input Delay (FID), one of the three core web vitals, is all about interactivity. What exactly does this metric describe? How is it measured? Why do we use it? Let's have a closer look.

Core Web Vitals are currently all the rage. For good reason! They're simple and user-centric. Therefore it's really important that we understand and optimize them. Let's have a closer look at the LCP - Largest Contentful Paint - metric.

Next.js can be a great choice for static sites and being a freelance developer specialized in fast websites, it was an obvious choice for me. Let's see how and what I used to build this site.

In Next.js 11 the image tag is updated and gets additional features like the ability to import images and to use blur placeholders. Let's examine the effects of the image tag and how it helps us to improve performance.

NetlifyCMS and Next.js make a really nice combination. More often than not, the admin view provided by the CMS is enough. However, sometimes we might need custom preview components. In this post we will see how to do this with NetlifyCMS and Next.js

GPX files are used to track a variety of sports and activities. When we take a look under the hood, we see that they use a simple XML based schema. Such files can easily be rendered in a React application with the help of libraries like Leaflet.

When it comes to server-side-rendering with React, there are two main frameworks to consider: Gatsby and Next.js, but what are their differences? Which one should you choose and when?

Starting in May 2021 Core Web Vitals will play a significant role in your website's and e-commerce store's SEO performance. Despite daunting acronyms like LCP, CLS and FID, these metrics are actually easy to understand and we will see how they improve the experience of a site's visitors.

Landing page optimization is a huge topic and best practices exist for various fields, but what should a landing page look like for an e-commerce Shopify store? Let's have a look at common landing page optimizations and how they apply to shops.

With a pandemic and lock-downs entering the scene, the e-commerce space experienced huge growth. However, one category benefits from this more than any other: e-commerce for grocery shopping and food products. Is this trend here to stay? Or will it ebb down, as our lives return back to normal?

To increase their sales successful ecommerce stores use common patterns to optimize their product listings. Let's have a deeper look at four of these: 1. Variant indicators 2. Familiar elements 3. Display an alternative picture on hover 4. Contrasting text on complex pages.

Which Google Lighthouse issues are causing the largest losses for the most visited Austrian websites? A look at the performance, accessibility, best practice and seo scores of 23 websites.

TailwindCSS 2.0 introduces an additional and wider breakpoint to the container class. To keep the old breakpoints in case of an upgrade, we need to adapt our tailwind.config.js file.

Building docker containers on small cloud instances can result in failing builds. Let's see how we can work around this issue.

What if we can't hardcode which icon to use in our react component and the icon to use is specified in a CMS or a JSON source?

In next.js we use _app.js for layouts which should not be rerendered on page transitions. In this post we will see how we can extend this approach to persistent sublayouts on sections of our website.

Sometimes we need to get access to a react component's width and height properties. In this post we will explore how to create a react hook, which dynamically returns these values on resizing.

Many sites depend on data scraped from external pages. Despite this task being so common, there is no standard way to approach it and depending on our approach we face different problems. In this post we'll see how Next.js and incremental static generation provide a great solution.

Running a Next.js application in Docker greatly simplifies maintenance and portability. Let us have a detailed look into how to create a production ready Dockerfile. We will start out by creating the simplest version possible and then add layer caching and a .dockerignore file.

Image sizes and formats play a huge role in website performance. Sites containing unnecessary large images result in a large bandwith usage for our users and affect loading times of the overall site and SEO. Therefore, we want to take a look at an amazing way to create optimized images in our Next.js applications with the help of next-optimized-images.

One of many reasons to use Next.js is improved SEO for your react application and an important part of this are the numerous SEO meta tags. While adding these tags is already supported by the framework, the process can be made even easier with using next-seo. In this post we will compare the approach with and without next-seo.

Both Next.js and Google's Material UI as a component library are hugely popular in the react community. However, when used in conjunction there are some pitfalls with the Links inside the application are handled. Let us have a brief look at how to properly handle Button and ListElement components, acting as internal links in the application.

This short post demonstrates how to use absolute imports of react components in a react native application created with expo.

This tutorial shows a small example how to allow users to log in and sign up with their google accounts in a strapi and react based application.

This small guide walks you through the steps to create OAuth credentials in the Google Developer Console for use with a web application.

The most common problems observed in microservice systems include 1. Wrong Cuts 2. Shared Persistency 3. Shared Libraries 4. Direct calls from Clients to Microservices 5. Too many standards.

Serving multiple web applications for different domains can be easily achieved via the use of nginx. In this post we will go through an example on how to achieve this with an nginx docker container.

A comparison of the API Gateway and the Backend For Frontend (BFF) pattern. The API Gateway is a single point of entry into the system for all clients, while a BFF is only responsible for a single type of client. To choose between those patterns we need to consider several factors...