kuzmatech

[kuzmatech]

Considerations for Go

So my role at GrantTree , was primarily a Product Owner/Software Engineer role during hiring and that was what I was picked up for; to take ownership of a legacy internal tool as well as maintain it and develop new features.

That was early 2019 and as things do in all companies there have been shifts in the requirements of not just my role but my team as a whole. Going into the role, there was very little in the way of documentation, error logging. After some discussions I ended up being appointed for DevOps as I was the only one passionate about the area and with active experience with things like TDD/BDD and CI.

Moving into 2020, after some discussions within the team, primarily with the CTO, we're looking at moving to a micro-services based architecture and have started a transition away from a bare-metal infrastructure to usage of Google's Cloud Platform.

Up until this point I hadn't really paid too much attention to Go if I'm honest but this sparked a discussion on if it was time to move away from using Python as our primary language.

One of the biggest concerns with a micro-services pattern is the risk of code repetition, and Python doesn’t have the best package management system, which sparked the conversation of potentially using Node.JS as things like Cloud Functions and GCP’s natural support for Node as well as the usefulness of NPM and the package.json , could allow us to manage dependencies in a reasonably sane way.

But it was brought to my attention the possibility of using Go's native support for importing Git packages and that opened my eyes to the language and lead me to explore this great talk from Carmen Andoh

[kuzmatech]

Another System Architecture

I figured I should try and get some more system architecture on my blog, I’ve left out the annotations from this image as I intended to do this blog post.

Front-end

The plan for the front-end is to use a reverse-proxy to render out most of the pages using the server side rendering, but pre-render and cache pages that are either used very frequently or very infrequently.

We're going to use a reverse-proxy to handle things such as flushing the caches, load balancing etc.

For any dynamic data the front-end will make API calls to the back-end server and fill things in using javascript. The server side rendering will handle caching on these calls for frequently used and unchanging data.

Back-end

The plan for the back-end is to use the API server to manage data calls to/from the relevant database, to handle data transfer between the two databases, handle some light caching on data calls and also act as a pass-through for external APIs.

#system architecture #web development

[kuzmatech]

A new website design for After Five Cleaning

#web design

[kuzmatech]

A set of images I did for the promotion of the Trial By Fire tournament series by the Densetsu Zone project.

#social media

[kuzmatech]

I did some twitch buttons and a new offline background for my channel since I got affiliate, some more examples of my work.

#twitch #design

[kuzmatech]

A stream overlay I did for the Densetsu Zone project to be used in-matches in their Trial By Fire tournament series.

#twitch

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An overlay I did for the professional Pokkén player and commentator Sabrewoif.

#twitch

[kuzmatech]

More work

I��ve been working on a community project for the Fighting Game eSports scene recently and was struck with the issue of creating an entire MEAN application and re-create the wheel to prevent bloat from a CMS such as Wordpress and come to an interesting solution.

I made the decision to use Tumblr’s Submit feature to handle the community interaction and use Tumblr as a fully-fledged CMS for the front-end whilst using Google’s App Engine for any back-end stuff for an API if it’s needed.

A fun and creative solution to the issue I think and after using Tumblr, I’ve actually decided that I quite like its templating system and how it handles content on the UI side and will probably use it for future projects.

[kuzmatech]

Some logo work

Just finished creating a new logo for Denetsu Zone and I think it looks pretty good.

For those of you who don’t know Densetsu means “Legend” in Japanese so I figured I’d roll with that theme and take some inspiration from Japanese Kamon crests.

#logos #design

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A twitch stream overlay I did for my roommate.

#twitch

[kuzmatech]

It’s been a while

Hmmm, haven’t been blogging so much due to the break that I took from development, I’ve been tweeting a load of things I’ve been doing in terms of other ventures but came to the realisation that I can re-purpose this blog to detail more areas of my work outside of just development.

#update

[kuzmatech]

A website design I did for a client on Freelancer.com , sadly they did not end up going for my design.

#web design

[kuzmatech]

System architecture continued

Just a bit of an update on that system architecture I was working on the other day, it looks to be pretty much complete however I may update it with some things in more detail as I start to actually work on the code.

I'll most likely end up listing the requirements I need from each componenet to help me decide what technologies I'm going to be looking to use.

For example, the user data is most likely going to need to be schemaless for the sake of flexibility leading me to something like CouchDB/MongoDB.

#complex systems #saas #system architecture #software development

[kuzmatech]

Gifts

Friend: I hate when people tell me I should know what they want.

Me: I know right.

Friend: It's like I'm so busy I probably don't even know your birthday right now, how am I going to know what you want as a gift ?

Just a funny little interaction I had with a buddy of mine the other night.

[kuzmatech]

Update on Mockup

Initial

The initial landing page intended to catch people’s attention, I quite like the look of it tbh, clean and shows the majority of what people need to know at first glance.

Additional

This section is intended to provide some more information for anyone that has been caught by the initial landing page, not much more to say about it.

Additonal - Call to Action

This section is pretty much providing instructions on how to get started and serves as the call to action for the page.

Conclusion

As you can see I've gone for a pretty minimalistic approach in total nothing too fancy but I quite like a mostly flat ui style with certain sections being raised to draw emphasis to the work.

Will mostly contain some small changes in the final product but we'll see how it turns out.

#webdesign #web design #graphic design

[kuzmatech]

Spent the day doing wire framing and a quick mock-up for the landing page although I’m not totally satisfied with it yet I quite like the minimalistic theme that’s planned out.

#web design #design #ux #user experience #wireframe #minimal

[kuzmatech]

System Architecture is always fun!

Been working on the company site as its been borderline useless for far too long, it pretty much exists at this point just as a placeholder.

I’ve decided that optimally for working with clients an SPA makes the most sense so that they can manage licenses for existing and future SaaS from a nice dashboard and as pretty much all of the SaaS products exist as SPAs this creates a nice consistency throughout our systems.

Current Plans:

Overall, we want to keep things pretty simple with a micro-services architecture both for scaling but also from a budgeting perspective it allows us to easily scale up/down specific parts of the system that are in high demand without having to incur additional costs that may not be necessary at that specific moment.

#programming #system architecture #saas