December 2016 Summaries

DraftJS is a rich-text editing framework based on an immutable model, released by Facebook in 2016 to change the approach to Rich Text Editing on the web. The development of DraftJS was made possible by Nik Graf's plugin architecture, called draft-js-plugins. The history of Rich Text Editing led to the creation of tools like DraftJS and its plugins, making rich-text editing great again with the help of founders like Brian Douglas of OpenSauced.

Netlify emphasizes its commitment to open source, believing it's integral to their company DNA. They've created multiple open source projects, including a CMS, APIs, and tools for configuration testing, with the goal of furthering the JAMstack category and driving innovation in modern web development. Netlify encourages community involvement, inviting contributors to share ideas and improve existing projects. The company acknowledges the time and energy required for open source projects but hopes to foster new standards and innovation through collaborative efforts.

GraphQL is an open source query language from Facebook that connects APIs to Frontend applications by providing a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, allowing clients to ask for exactly what they need. Graphcool provides a flexible backend platform combining GraphQL with AWS Lambda, enabling developers to quickly get a project up and running. A one-click deploy button is available, which clones a React and Relay application, making it easy to try out GraphQL and its capabilities.

I've been working in programming professionally for about 3 years, with a focus on JavaScript for roughly half that time. When I made the jump into the JavaScript ecosystem, I needed help maintaining consistent syntax, which led me to discover Airbnb's style guide.` `Airbnb's style guide is essential for growing engineering teams as it provides a standardized set of best practices and guidelines for coding conventions, making code more readable and maintainable.` `To create a comprehensive style guide, one must consider the importance of consistency, readability, and scalability, ensuring that the guide can be easily adopted by new team members and scaled to accommodate growing development needs.

The JAMstack, a methodology of developing web applications using static site generators, server-side rendering, and APIs, offers numerous benefits over traditional bulky server-dependent software like WordPress, Drupal, and Heroku. By migrating to the JAMstack on Netlify, developers can significantly reduce full download times, improve page load speed, enhance security with HTTPS, leverage HTTP2, optimize DNS lookup time, minimize HTTPS handshake time, and ensure valid SSL certificates. The gradual migration process allows developers to spread the risk of switching, enjoy faster site loading, simpler maintenance, and seamless feature additions. Netlify's proxying feature enables a phased approach to migrating data and content, making it an ideal solution for developers transitioning from antiquated infrastructure.

Netlify has created a resource hub called "Netlify News" to help developers navigate the latest trends and best practices in building, deploying, and maintaining websites. This platform features various content initiatives such as guides, tutorials, blogs, case studies, podcasts, and designers corner, providing users with a wealth of information on the JAMstack and modern web development. The hub aims to keep users informed about the latest developments and maintain them on the cutting edge of modern web development through Netlify's own content and external resources.

The downtime of a service's database, which occurred on November 22nd, was caused by the database filling up its disk space due to rapid growth in file deployment. The team had noticed an upward trend in database size days earlier and began preparing for potential issues, but ultimately failed to migrate data to a larger partition in time. Despite this, the CDN edge nodes continued to serve content, minimizing the impact of the outage. The team has since analyzed the situation, identified causes, and implemented measures to prevent similar outages, including revamping their monitoring system, deploying a new status page with incident history, and modifying their replication method to reduce space usage. They have also redesigned their database handling practices to ensure a live master and slave during potentially impactful operations.