I ran into a situation that seems counterintuitive. Nginx is a web server for hosting web content. Cloudflare is a content delivery network. You normally put your content delivery network in front of your web web server to speed things up. I recently needed to put Nginx in front of Cloudflare and I figured it might be worthwhile documenting in case someone else runs into the same situation. My main web site https://mzfit.

GitHub is an absolutely fantastic service. Really. Microsoft deserves real kudos for taking it over and keeping it running as a world class service to the community. It drives open source development and the free tier for startups is generous enough that it’s pretty easy to run free until you start making a profit and start needing the enterprisey features. I’m such a fan I recently wrote a post about how I performance tuned my GitHub CICD pipeline.

A CI/CD Pipeline is one of the key tools software engineers have to produce high quality software. It stands for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). The idea being that instead of making a bunch of changes to your software and then pulling it all together to test it at the end, you should continuously integrate (test) and release (deploy) your software to find bugs faster. Like many people, I store my software source code on GitHub.

Apple is a mindbogglingly big company and they make a lot of world class products. But for all the good stuff they make, sometimes they completely strike out. I just launched an Apple Watch app that uses Apple’s HealthKit API to start/stop/measure workouts on the Apple Watch. It was not a pleasant 3 months of my life, and I would like to share some of the pain I experienced. Because it didn’t need to be this way, and I hope someone at Apple is listening.

Microservices (mostly) solve organizational problems, not technical problems It seems like every developer in the last 15 years thinks they need to build a micro services based architecture because that’s how you scale horizontally, just like Amazon, and what if, you know, your app is a really big success and you need to support a lot of users in a hurry? Microservices are an architectural and organizational approach to software development where software is composed of small independent services that communicate over well-defined APIs.

Apple’s App Store has made a lot of news in tech and policy circles recently. Apple and Epic and Apple and the European Union have been battling it out about whether or not Apple is allowed to gatekeep via their App Store. As it currently stands, in most countries (except the EU), if you want to develop native apps for iPhones and iPads you need to submit your app to Apple for review.