Developing Azure Functions in a Docker Container

Of late, I’ve become enamored with using Docker containers for anything and everything (I recently posted about doing development in a Docker container). So when I needed to do some work on a small Azure Functions project, the first thing I investigated was whether or not I could do my development/testing in a Docker container […]

Docker for Mac: Overcoming Slow Mounted Volumes with Visual Studio Code

A couple of years ago, Will Pleasant-Ryan wrote Docker for Mac: Overcoming Slow Mounted Volumes, describing his desire to use Docker for local development. He talked about some of the filesystem performance problems that can arise when using a shared volume from the host machine on Mac OS X, along with some potential workarounds and […]

Bake Production Testing into Your Application

Unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing, exploratory testing—all are important methods that contribute to delivering quality software. But there’s another important kind of testing that is often overlooked, and that’s testing the production environment. For example, has the production environment been configured correctly so the system can successfully send email? Can the system access a […]

BLOBs with Knex and PostgreSQL

My team and I recently decided that we should store user-generated binary files in our PostgreSQL database so that a user could download them at a later time. This is different from uploading those files to something like Amazon S3 (which we’ll likely consider migrating to at some point down the road).

Discriminated Unions in GraphQL and TypeScript

Both GraphQL and TypeScript support the concept of discriminated unions (also known as tagged unions). In this post, I’ll walk through setting up an example GraphQL schema and the corresponding TypeScript types, along with writing a query to retrieve a union type.

Wrapping a TypeScript Function for Background Execution

In my last post, I showed how to write a higher-order function that could wrap an existing function without losing the original function’s types. Today, I’m going to show how you can use that same technique to wrap an existing function for a different result–to execute it in a background process using the workerpool npm […]

Generic Higher-Order Functions in TypeScript

As of TypeScript 3.1, the lib.es5.d.ts file provides a couple of predefined types that are very helpful when trying to write generic higher-order functions. In this post, I’m going to show an example of using the Parameters and ReturnType predefined types for just that purpose.

Using an Int Type in TypeScript

The project I’m working on has a Node.js back end written in TypeScript, with a PostgreSQL database for persistence. We had a production user who encountered an error when the system tried to insert a row into a table that had an integer column in it. The value it was trying to insert was 239.99999999999997, […]

Building a Fake API for Testing & Development

Nearly all applications developed today will integrate with an external service of some kind (HTTP, Bluetooth, etc.). These integrations can pose problems for automated testing, exploratory testing, and even demonstrating functionality to a stakeholder.

Understanding the Apollo Default Resolver

According to documentation for Apollo’s GraphQL-tools: You don’t need to specify resolvers for every type in your schema. If you don’t specify a resolver, GraphQL.js falls back to a default one… The documentation goes on to state that the default resolver will look for a property on the parent object with the field name that’s […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Patrick Bacon

Author: Patrick Bacon