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Colin Chartier
Colin is co-founder & CEO at webapp.io. He previously worked as CTO at ParseHub and as a software design lecturer at the University of Toronto.
You can reach him at [email protected]
all webapp.io posts
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BY Colin Chartier
5 min read
The difference between VMs and containers
The primary difference between Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers is that the former is more powerful, but the latter is faster. ...
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
BY Colin Chartier
4 min read
What is a blue/green deployment?
Blue/green deployments are a strategy to deploy a new version of an application. They work by starting an entirely new instance of the application, and then routing traffic over to it. ...
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BY Colin Chartier
4 min read
Linting best practices
Linters are programs that look at a program's source code and find problems automatically. They are a common feature of pull request automation because they ensure that "obvious" bugs do not make it to production. ...
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
BY Colin Chartier
4 min read
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a methodology that helps engineering teams build better products by continuously integrating user feedback. ...
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
BY Colin Chartier
3 min read
What are rolling deployments?
Rolling deployments are a strategy to deploy a new version of an application without causing downtime. They work by creating a single instance of the new version of an application, then shutting off one instance of the old version until all instances have been upgraded. ...
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BY Colin Chartier
2 min read
What is autoscaling?
Autoscaling automates horizontal scaling to ensure that the number of workers is proportional to the load on the system. ...
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
BY Colin Chartier
5 min read
Serverless is more expensive than you'd expect
The core idea for serverless is to specify a strategy for creating new webservers, instead of starting them yourself. That way if your product gets a huge burst of traffic, your cloud provider can start many copies of the webserver, and turn them off as the traffic subsides. ...
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
BY Colin Chartier
4 min read
What is an ephemeral environment?
Ephemeral environments are temporary deployments that contain a self-contained version of your application, generally for every feature branch. ...
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
BY Colin Chartier
4 min read
System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub & job server
If you need a publish/subscribe or job server at any point in your project, try using Postgres. It'll give you lots of data integrity and performance guarantees, and it doesn't require you or your team learning any new technology. ...
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