Archives

Archives / 2022

  • The blessing and leaky abstraction of Azure App Service

    No Comments

    It's hard to believe that it has already been over eight years since I migrated all of my goodies from a dedicated server to Azure. For the most part, I'm thankful for this arrangement because maintaining your own hardware isn't something I ever enjoyed or wanted to do. Having a single box was always asking for failure, too, even though I had an extra drive in the thing (which did fail once) as a backup. I couldn't respond to scale needs if I had to either, and there was one point where it would have helped. Meanwhile, Azure has improved in a lot of ways since then as far as pricing structures go. The SQL database pools were a real game changer for me, because it works with the same flexibility as app services, which all live on the same "plan" with whatever memory and CPU constraints you're paying for. The database uses some goofy units, but whatever they are, I rarely average more than 5% of them.

    Read more...

  • My journey so far with web components

    No Comments

    As I get closer to the release of POP Forums v19 (and there sure are a ton of things baked in there!), I'm starting to think back about my first experience using web components. For years I've talked about trying to modernize the front-end of the app, choosing instead to focus on scalability, but there isn't much room left to squeeze more performance out of it in practical terms, or at least not for what I need. What I kept coming back to was the fact that forums are mostly walls of text, and with tens of thousands of indexed threads on Google, I wasn't going to risk two decades of investment to break it with exotic and unnecessary appification of the, uh, app. Still, a big old file of spaghetti Javascript wasn't sustainable either, even if I did in the last release get away from the old jQuery dependency.

    Read more...