Monitoring and alerting are essential aspects to any production software system. An effective monitoring solution aggregates data across a range of metrics and presents it in a readable, human-friendly manner. A useful monitoring dashboard might allow you to quickly answer…
When reaching customers through multiple channels it's important to present a consistent brand image and user experience. However, implementing and maintaining this across all digital products is no easy task. All of your applications, all run by separate teams, need to stay…
If you build applications with the Serverless Framework and deploy them to AWS, it's likely that at some point, as your apps grow in size and complexity, you'll bump up against the fact that CloudFormation stacks can contain a maximum of 200 resources. Given 200 resources is…
During this uncertain time we know that everybody needs to offer what they can to support each other, the community, and small business. orangejellyfish, as company adept in remote working, are fortunate enough to be operating relatively normally. This means we are in a position…
Recently I’ve been able to interview several startup founders, ranging from very early stage to actively scaling, bootstrapped to funded. Along with the lessons learned from my own hands-on work with startups, I’ve put together my highlights on key points that could make or break…
At orangejellyfish one of our longest running problems has been the question of which pub to go to for a couple of drinks after work. Recently, we decided it was time to solve that problem and put some of our open source software to work in the process! Since we use Slack for…
When working with icons in React Native apps we're spoilt for choice with a wide range of free and open-source icon sets such as FontAwesome, Material and Ionicons. To make things even easier, the wonderful react-native-vector-icons project bundles all of those icon sets plus…
When developing Serverless applications for AWS it's likely that you'll end up working with CloudFormation before long. The Serverless Framework relies heavily on CloudFormation to manage your application infrastructure and if you require resources beyond Lambda functions and API…
Every program and every privileged user of the system should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job. That quote, by American computer scientist Jerome Saltzer, underpins the concept that became known as the "Principle of Least Privilege". The…
Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to find out which commit in the history of a git repository was responsible for causing some change in behaviour? It's a fairly common debugging technique, especially in larger, older codebases. If you know where to find the code…
As noted by Kyle Gill in his popular "Image Optimization Made Easy with Gatsby.js" post, ensuring that images used on the modern web are best suited for the end user in terms of screen size and connection speed, can be an arduous task. But it's a task that can bring huge benefits…
We are excited to announce that we have released our Serverless framework starter kit as an open-source project on GitHub. Following the release of our Gatsby starter kits this is the next step in our efforts to give back to the community. Check out the code on GitHub! The…
At orangejellyfish we're big on consistency in any codebase. It can be really frustrating when you're learning your way around a new project to be confronted with a mess of different styles and conventions. If nothing is consistent there's a much greater cognitive overhead to…
We are excited to announce that we have started to release some of our Gatsby starter kits as open-source projects on GitHub. We've been big fans of Gatsby at orangejellyfish for a while now and we hope that some of the lessons we've learned can be of use to others in the…
Building something from scratch is challenging. Balancing between costs (like time, effort or money) and between functionality, is hard work in a startup project. An early stage project, in order to succeed, needs to take different directions sometimes even on daily basis. To…
Starting without a framework One of the biggest mistakes made when creating a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda is writing functions without a framework. There are multiple frameworks available to deploy and wire up Lambda functions to the events which will be triggering…
Node has continued to become more and more popular, most likely due to it's flexibility, fairly low learning curve, and performance characteristics. It is no longer the black sheep in the enterprise world and its adoption continues to grow. However, a lot of developers overlook…