January 2021 Newsletter

I've decided to start posting my newsletter up onto the site. Now you can see what you'd be getting in your inbox without having to provide an email address, but I do still hope you'll subscribe. As a small incentive, subscribers get them a month before the site.

This month I've got a link discussing the differences between message queues and message busses, how to fetch data in parallel in JavaScript and a link to where this site is hosted.

As with all the links I put in my newsletter, I've found them useful in the previous month, so hopefully you will too. As always, if you think something is wrong, please let me know.

Architecture - Messaging System Decisions

I was recently asked what the difference between a Bus and Queue was and why you would use one over the other. Half way through muttering things like FIFO and send vs publish, I realised my knowledge was ok, but not at the level of being able to teach someone else.

After a bit of reading around, I think Steve Smith, aka Ardalis nails it with Bus or Queue. What I particularly like is the link to stack overflow, to provide even more information.

Parallel Fetching in JavaScript

I was building a tool where the values in a couple dropdowns depended on a previous value. To get the fast part of "make it work, make it right, make it fast" I researched a way of making parallel calls. This JavaScript Quick Tip — Avoid Serial Request Waterfalls sorted me out.

Promise.All is nice and similar to Task.WhenAll, so I went for that one.

Awesome Gatsby Hosting

I can't say enough great things about the host of this site Vercel. If you're an old timer like me and remember zipping up a folder and FTP-ing files, or even right-click Deploy, I recommend you checkout how painless it is with Vercel.

I've recently started learning Unity and considered setting up https://games.mattdufeu.co.uk as a seperate repository to host them. It's not there yet, but I went from nothing to live with a proof of concept (basic Next.js site and Unity game on a sub-domain) in under an hour.

And what's more incredible is the fact it's free until you start using a lot of bandwidth in a month. Currently 100GB, yes with a G!

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