Nicolas Fränkel

As part of learning the Rust ecosystem, I dedicated the last few days to error management. Here are my findings. Error management 101 The Rust book describes the basics of error management. The language separates between recoverable errors and unrecoverable ones. Unrecoverable errors benefit from the panic!() macro. When Rust panics, it stops the program. Recoverable errors are much more enjoyable. Rust uses the Either monad, which stems from Functional Programming. Opposite to exceptions

The OWASP stands for Open Worldwide Application Security Project: The Open Worldwide Application Security Project is an online community that produces freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the fields of IoT, system software and web application security. The OWASP provides free and open resources. It is led by a non-profit called The OWASP Foundation. The OWASP Top 10 - 2021 is the published result of recent research based on comprehensive data com

Last year, I wrote a post on Open Telemetry Tracing to understand more about the subject. I also created a demo around it, which featured the following components: The Apache APISIX API GatewayA Kotlin/Spring Boot serviceA Python/Flask serviceAnd a Rust/Axum service I’ve recently improved the demo to deepen my understanding and want to share my learning. Using a regular database In the initial demo, I didn’t bother with a regular database. Instead: The Kotlin service used the e

Last year, I started to use Excalidraw as a diagram tool. However, the SVG images didn’t display the font correctly. In this post, I’d like to explain the problem and offer a solution. Let’s create a sample drawing with Excalidraw. If you open the link, it should look something like this: However, in a browser, it looks like this: The code is straightforward: <img src='/path/to/sample.svg'> The font doesn’t display correctly. The problem is that the

I never moved away from Docker Desktop. For some time, after you use it to build an image, it prints a message: What's Next? View a summary of image vulnerabilities and recommendations → docker scout quickview I decided to give it a try. I’ll use the root commit of my OpenTelemetry tracing demo. Let’s execute the proposed command: docker scout quickview otel-catalog:1.0 Here’s the result: ✓ Image stored for indexing ✓ Indexed 272 packages Target

Last year, I wrote my first yearly retrospective. I liked the experience, so I’m trying one more time. Let the future decide if it will become a trend or not. Before diving into our safe technological world, my thoughts go to Ukraine, to my friends who had to flee their own country, to other friends who fought on the front to defend it from an imperial power, and to all victims of an old kleptocrat who clings to power despite the cost to others. The free world needs to support Ukraine mor

In early 2021, I started to work on the Apache APISIX project. I have to admit that I had never heard about it before. In this post, I’d like to introduce some Apache projects that are less well-known than HTTPD or Kafka. Apache APISIX APISIX is an API Gateway. It builds upon OpenResty, a Lua layer built on top of the famous nginx reverse-proxy. APISIX adds abstractions to the mix, e.g., Route, Service, Upstream, and offers a plugin-based architecture. Lots of plugins are provided ou

Apache APISIX is an API Gateway, which builds upon the OpenResty reverse-proxy to offer a plugin-based architecture. The main benefit of such an architecture is that it brings structure to the configuration of routes. It’s a help at scale, when managing hundreds or thousands of routes. In this post, I’d like to describe how plugins, priority, and phases play together and what pitfalls you must be aware of. APISIX plugin’s priority When you configure a route with multiple p

In a few words, the idea of canary releases is to deliver a new software version to only a fraction of the users, analyze the results, and decide whether to proceed further or not. If results are not aligned with expectations, roll back; if they are, increase the number of users exposed until all users benefit from the new version. In this post, I’d like to detail this introduction briefly, explain different ways to define the fraction, and show how to execute it with Apache APISIX. Int

In my previous post Chopping the Monolith, I explained that some parts of a monolith are pretty stable and only the fast-changing parts are worth being 'chopped.' I turned the post into a talk and presented it at several conferences. I think it’s pretty well received; I believe it’s because most developers understand, or have direct experience, that microservices are not a good fit for traditional organizations, as per Conway’s Law. In the talk, I use an e-commerce webapp as a