March 2019 Summaries

Paul Jarvis, a writer and entrepreneur who has advised professional athletes, corporate giants, and entrepreneurs, recently shared his insights on intentional growth in an AMA. He emphasized the importance of questioning all growth before proceeding and encouraged founders to determine the type of business they want to run, how they define success, and what goals should matter. His latest book, "Company of One," explores why a bigger digital business isn't always better.

DigitalOcean has introduced support for Proxy Protocol in its Load Balancers to pass client connection information through a load balancer on to the destination server. This feature is now available at no additional cost and can be activated by checking a box in the Advanced settings section when creating or managing a Load Balancer. DigitalOcean Kubernetes seamlessly integrates with Load Balancers, allowing users to ensure that each pod in their Kubernetes cluster can retrieve the original client IP address. Proxy Protocol is supported in all regions for $12 per month and aims to enhance the functionality of DigitalOcean Load Balancers by enabling backend servers to receive client information such as IP address and port number.

This tutorial guides you through building a simple contacts list web page using Go and PostgreSQL. The resulting page displays a list of contacts fetched from a PostgreSQL database. Along the way, you will learn how to connect to a Postgres database in Go using the sqlx and pgx packages, render data dynamically using a template, and serve the resulting page on an HTTP server.

This tutorial introduces GraphQL, a query language and runtime for executing queries, by setting up a GraphQL server over Postgres and trying out some GraphQL queries, mutations, and subscriptions. The key benefits of using GraphQL over RESTful APIs are increased speed in building and iterating on the frontend app, reduced data sent from the server to client apps, and streamlined communication between frontend and backend teams. A GIF shows how a GraphQL client can make precise queries to a GraphQL API server to fetch exactly the data it needs and in the shape that it wants. The tutorial also covers query variables, multiple root nodes, querying related data, mutations, subscriptions, and the GraphQL schema.

NKN has released a 1-Click App on the new DigitalOcean Marketplace to help users quickly set up an NKN full node. To create this app, they used Packer, which automates the process of creating and updating images across multiple cloud providers. The process involves obtaining a DigitalOcean API token, using the appropriate builder in Packer, provisioning the image with necessary software, passing variables to the Packer template for security purposes, and following some final tips for effective image creation.

Adam Wathan, a full-stack developer and entrepreneur, emphasizes the importance of using existing software to focus on product development and marketing. He chose Gumroad for his recent product, Refactoring UI, instead of building his own payment processing system with Stripe's API. By leveraging existing platforms like Laravel Spark, Mailchimp, Fathom Analytics, Discourse, Carrd, Gumroad, Stripe, Trello, Twist, Cloudflare, and Laravel Spark, Wathan has been able to streamline his business operations and generate significant revenue. These tools help with website development, analytics, community management, landing pages, mailing lists, digital product sales, subscription billing, task tracking, internal communications, domain registration, and scaffolding for custom solutions.

DigitalOcean has launched Marketplace, a platform where developers can find preconfigured applications and solutions to get up and running quickly. The marketplace ecosystem is continually expanding with trusted partners providing tools and services in high demand from the developer community. Some of the initial 1-Click Apps include WordPress, Grafana, OpenFaaS, InfluxData Platform, and Hasura GraphQL Engine. Over the next few months, more apps and categories will be added based on feedback from the DigitalOcean community.

Kenneth Reitz, a Developer Relations Advocate, shares essential practices for managing PostgreSQL databases, emphasizing the importance of never storing database credentials in the codebase and instead using environment variables like DATABASE_URL for secure access. He advises regular rotation of database credentials, especially during team changes, to prevent security breaches and suggests using BIGINT or UUID for primary keys to avoid storage capacity issues and lengthy migrations. Connection pooling with tools like PgBouncer is recommended for performance optimization, though DigitalOcean provides this out-of-the-box for its Postgres users. These practices aim to enhance security, efficiency, and scalability for managed PostgreSQL databases.