Blog - kimserey lam

Jul 31, 2019

Dockerfile Instructions

Docker images package all the necessary pieces to run an application, the operating system, the application runtime, the environment and the application binaries into a reusable snapshot. To create a Docker image, we use a Dockerfile which specifies instructions to build the image. Docker images can be based on other Docker images which makes them reusable and allows us to delegate the tedious setup of an operating system with application runtime to others. Today we will explore the composition of a Dockerfile and look into examples in order to get an understanding of the set of instructions at our disposal to build a Docker.

Jul 26, 2019

Interface And Type In Typescript

One thing that I had a hard time to understand when starting to work with Typescript was the differences between Type and Interface. Even after working with TS for quite some time it can be difficult to see the benefits and interesting combinations one can provide over the other. Tslint is very helpful in that regards with a set of rules enforcing the use of the right definition. So today we will look in more details on the differences and the benefits of Type and Interface.

Jul 19, 2019

Getting Started With Typescript

In previous blog posts we looked into features of Angular. The language used to code Angular is Typescript - a superset of Javascript, and Angular itself relies heavily on the features of Typescript but also NodeJS libraries. When it comes to testing functionalities completely unrelated to the browser or even the website itself, it is good to have an easy way to design a piece of logic with functions, classes, and module and execute it directly using Node rather than having to bundle it within an Angular SPA. With that idea in mind, today we will look into how to setup a simple project running Typescript code which will allow us for example to test functionalities of rxjs without the need to bootstrapping a frontend project.

Jul 12, 2019

Keep Github Fork Up To Date

When working on open-sourced projects, it is common behavior to fork a repository. The fork repository is a replica of the main repository with the only difference being that it is under our own ownership and is separated from the original repository. That allows us to make changes to the project without impacting the main repository. This scenario is very common for contributions where we make commits on our fork repository and later on submit a pullrequest against the original repository. But after having forked the repository, our own copy no longer gets new updates from the original repository. Today we will see how we can setup a forked repository to continue getting the latest commits from the original repository.

Jul 05, 2019

Designing Api With Open Api Specification 3

The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) is a standard describing the interface of restful APIs. It provides a way for developers to understand quickly the functionalities provided by an API, and also provides a way to automate tasks around discovery, testing and also generation of client SDK in multiple languages. Each language plus web framework combination provides some sort libraries enabling auto-generation of the OpenAPI specification, for example in DotNetCore we have Swashbuckle.AspNetCore or in Python with Flask we have Flasgger. Today we will take the opposite idea to auto-generation and craft the specification by hand. The technology agnositic aspect of the OpenAPI specification makes it an incredible tool to design APIs and brainstorm at the interface level prior writing a single line ofe code. We will look into what constitute a specification and how we can arrange the specification in a human friendly way.

Jun 28, 2019

Create Test Suites With Postman And Newman

Postman is a free development tool which helps testing API. It provides a complete API testing desktop application allowing us to create requests, organise them in collections and write test assertions while also providing variables management at different levels, environment level, collection level or request level. On top of that, it can easily be integrated into our automated CI using Newman, the CLI for running collections.

Jun 21, 2019

Angular Pipes

In Angular, Pipes are used to specify operations directly on the HTML template, operating directly on the value prior being embedded to the template. The major benefit of pipes is their simplicity, using them we are able to remove abstract out logic which we would otherwise reside in the component. In a previous post, we discussed the AsyncPipe used to subscribe to observables. Today we will see the rest of the pipes available in Angular and how they can be used:

Jun 14, 2019

Private Blob Storage With Minio

Minio is a open source distriubted storage. Few weeks ago, I showed how we could use it to store Microsoft Orleans actor states by implementing a grain storage backed with Minio. Today we will see how we can install two parts of Minio, the Minio server and the Minio client and we can update it when need be.

Jun 07, 2019

Nondeterministic Evaluation

We recently looked into a simple metacircular evaluator interpreting a part of Lisp. We saw that it was possible to reimplement some of the functionalities by parsing Lisp expressions. We also saw that by slightly changing the order of application, we were able to turn our language into a lazy language. Today we will look into nondeterministic evaluation, also called ambiguous evaluation, another concept which can be made available to the language by re-modeling our evaluator in the same way as we did to introduce laziness.

May 31, 2019

Lazy Evaluation

Last week we implemented a metacircular evaluator in Racket, evaluating a subset of Racket language. We saw that the main functions part of an evaluator are eval evaluating the meaning of an expression and apply, applying a procedure to arguments. We wrote the evaluator following the order of execution of arguments and procedures from Lisp. Lisp being an applicative-order language, when provided a procedure with parameters, the parameters get evaluated before the procedure is applied. As opposed to normal-order languages, also called lazy languages, which delay the evaluation of arguments until the result of the procedure application is required. Today we will see the implication of this slight change in order of application by modifying our evaluator created last week, transforming it into a lazy evaluator.

May 23, 2019

Metacircular Evaluator In Lisp

In previous posts, we explored the concepts of abstraction, mutability, and closure. A common point to all of them is that they were made available by programming languages. In fact, programming languages can themselves be seen as a very low level abstraction composed by a set of expressions. A programming language is written by composing functions together, like any other program, and interpreting the meaning of expressions given. Today we will look at how we can create an evaluator by implementing a metacircular evaluator supporting a subset of the syntax of Lisp.

May 17, 2019

Algorithm Optimization With Dynamic Programming

Dynamic programming (DP), is an algorithm design technique used to turn exponential complexity problems into polynomial complexity problems. Described as careful brute force (Erik Demaine - MIT course 6.006), problems are deconstructed into overlaping subproblems, solved indepedently with brute force, subproblems solutions are then cached and reused. The reusability aspect being a major contributor to the optimization due to the overlapping nature of the subproblems.

May 10, 2019

Nginx Proxy Pass

In a previous post, we saw how we could host an ASP.NET Core application behind Nginx. We saw that Kestrel works as a selfhost webserver and that in order to get request forwarded to it, we need to proxy them using the location and proxy_pass directives. Today we will look into some details regarding path handling, ensuring that our requests are forwarded properly.

May 03, 2019

Nginx Gzip

When building single page applications, like Angular applications, where the entire application is sent over HTTP, compressing static files before serving them can provide a major boost in performance, drastically reducing latency. One of the most common compression algorithm widely supported by reverse proxies and browsers is Gzip. Today we will see how we can enable gzip compression on Nginx.

Apr 26, 2019

Angular Webpack Proxy Dev Server

Angular CLI provides an easy way to host Angular applications during development by using Webpack dev server. Due to the fact that Webpack dev server is a web server, our frontend gets hosted on a separate web server which causes CORS issues if we want to call endpoints on a backend which we also host locally for development. Today we will see how we can use one of the features of Webpack dev server to setup a proxy during development which will proxy calls from the Angular application to our local backend hence by passing the CORS issue.