Developer Community | Engineering at Dept Agency

Contentful Migrations

I've spent the last few days getting Contentful set up for a new project and have become frustrated with the migration story. As a developer, the primary way I interact with a CMS is by defining the data model. When project requirements change, I will need to update and grow the model to accommodate new feature requests. A good CMS, from my perspective, is one that makes this schema migration process safe and painless. Why we need migrations Some CMSs don't support migrations. The schema and a

Process

Introducing Web Blueprint - Our Practices for Web Development

This week we released a Github project called web-blueprint [https://github.com/rocketinsights/web-blueprint] that documents our practices and opinions on web development. If you're a prospective client or hire, our hope is that you'll learn a little bit more about what web engineering at Rocket is all about. [By the way, we're hiring!] I'm sure you've often found yourself asking "How do we usually...?" within your own team. I know we have. Six years ago, Rocket was five people in a small offi

Process

Marketing Analytics with AWS and Power BI

We recently completed a project with one of the largest affiliate marketing consulting firms in the US which turned out to be a great success for everyone involved. We asked one of the lead consultants on the project, Jason Lombardo, to answer a few questions which we hope will demonstrate the vast territory that is covered by a modern Data Architect / Engineer and how it all eventually comes together into a simple and friendly solution for the end users. How did this project start out? Jason:

Process

A Journey Moving the Monolith to Microservices

2020 was a hell of a year: A global pandemic, a fraught US election, and ... Microservices! 😬 Myself and a team of Rocket developers spent the entirety of 2020 at a client who wanted to move their Java based monolith into the 2020's with a spanking new Microservice / Single Page App (SPA) architecture. Sound a little too good to be true? Here was the catch: We needed to keep their old monolith running while we did it, and it is a big, complicated application. It's now 2021, and I can con

Platforms

Deployments at Scale with AWS ECR and ECS

With DevOps at DEPT, one of our primary goals is to make the life of the developer easier. A specialty of ours is assisting in our customer's deployment process. In short, this is how a code change can safely make it from a developer's laptop all the way to a production environment where it can be seen by end-users. In a typical software project, your environments will be something along the lines of dev, staging, and prod. Maintaining a release pipeline to these is simple enough in most cases,

Platforms

Create a Rust web service, from zero to cloud

Rust is a fantastic general-purpose language with a rich and expressive type system, but one of the reasons the language is so loved [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages] is the overall developer experience. Writing software can be very complex in any language. Working with the language and tools, however, should not be. This is an area where Rust shines! This tutorial will describe how to... * Insta

Process

File Uploads Directly to S3 From the Browser

Uploading files to S3 directly from the browser is a great way to increase performance by removing the need to process and then re-upload files from your own server. Note: In this post we'll be examining the use of pre-signed POST requests. See pre-signed URLs [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/PresignedUrlUploadObject.html] as an alternative (less powerful) method. Overview A traditional approach to file uploading would typically involve the client making a POST request to an

People

GitOps with Terraform, Terragrunt and GitHub Workflows

At DEPT, we love pushing the envelope of new technologies and tooling to deliver best-in-class products and solutions that delight our clients. We use Terraform and Terragrunt to build and provision as much as we possibly can, and recently we've begun leveraging GitHub Workflows for CI/CD. In this post, we'll take a look at how we combine these tools to create a GitOps centric workflow for managing cloud infrastructure. Specifically we'll: * Define GitOps * Review a sample Terraform app mod

Platforms

CI/CD with CodeBuild and CodePipeline

At DEPT we use a variety of hosted continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms to help our clients deliver great products and experiences to their customers. Recently, we've used a few of AWS's services to create full integration and delivery solutions. In this post we'll look at how we've used AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline to create a cost effective, performant and code driven end-to-end CI/CD solution. What is CodeBuild and CodePipeline? AWS has a number services they've

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