Backendology A study of backend web development by Jared Ririe

Recent Posts

Amazon Alexa Skill using a Go AWS Lambda Function

Amazon is currently running a promotion in which developers who publish a new skill to the Alexa Skills Store receive the new Echo Dot. While I do not own any Amazon devices, I decided to participate to get an interesting product, learn more about developing voice-based applications, and write my first AWS Lambda function in Go. Before I dive into the implementation, I think Amazon deserves some praise for this promotion. Read more...

Building Blocks of Distributed Systems

This blog post is based a chapter from The Architecture of Open Source Applications titled “Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems.” The Architecture of Open Source Applications Before getting into the details of the chapter, the book itself deserves some introduction. Its opening pages make the compelling point that architects in the traditional sense are exposed to and study thousands of real buildings, but software architects rarely make a similar investment, leading to repeated mistakes: Read more...

Introduction to Distributed Systems Course

In my previous blog post, I created a detailed reading list of the distributed systems content I deemed most important and interesting. This post is the next step towards designing a comprehensive course in distributed systems: creating an introductory course. Why not simply start at the top of the reading list and work down? I think any good introduction to this topic should provide a sampling of the various concepts and encourage experimentation and hands on learning. Read more...

Designing a Comprehensive Course in Distributed Systems: Reading List

In a recent conversation at work, I learned about MIT’s distributed systems course. As the majority of the content is available online through the course website, I was just about ready to dive in, follow the course, and report on what I learned. But then I had this thought: I am not formally a student anymore, so I should take more ownership of my learning. I should design my own comprehensive course in distributed systems! Read more...

Newsletter for Hugo Blog

As an update to my previous blog post which compared blog and website creation options, I chose the static site generator Hugo for my blog. I have enjoyed working with it so far! While some aspects of Wordpress have been trivial to replace due to first-class support for them in Hugo, other features have required more work. In this post, I will explain my replacement for Wordpress’s newsletter (email list) functionality. Read more...

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