DEV Community: Tom Boutell

Docker is exactly the same everywhere... wait, not quite!

Tom Boutell — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:59:32 +0000

TIL: when you run Docker (or podman) on a Mac and specify a universal base image like "node" or "node:22-bullseye", podman will default to a version of that image built specifically for your architecture.

This matters if your Dockerfile is going to attempt to install things that don't exist for your binary architecture. And in any case: you want to make sure production will behave exactly like your test environment.

Spoiler alert: production will be 64-bit Intel Linux.

So I added --platform=linux/amd64 to my docker build command, and now I can apt-get install and npm install things inside the Dockerfile with exactly the same results as on a Linux host.

"yup" is the new extra virgin olive oil

Tom Boutell — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 13:28:12 +0000

This is an unsolicited endorsement of "yup," an absolutely fantastic tool for validating input in all JavaScript and TypeScript applications.

I'm impressed by how well it meets my needs as a JavaScript developer while also, apparently, having absolutely ferocious TypeScript support for those who want to go all in on that.

Also an endorsement of @gregvanbrug for bringing it into my professional life.

I use yup in everything now. It's the new extra virgin olive oil.

https://github.com/jquense/yup

Useful open source tools: the little things add up

Tom Boutell — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 15:35:27 +0000

Over the years we've created lots of little open source modules that are useful on their own. Because they are not part of our core product, I don't often step back and look at them as a whole. Turns out, there's quite a collection. Tools for sanitizing HTML, tools for managing github organizations at scale, tools to improve performance, tools for localizing URLs, even a brand new tiny framework for microservices. Giving stuff away has a lot of benefits for us: it encourages quality, it encourages contributions, and of course it "gives back" for all the open source we're using to create ApostropheCMS, which is also under an open source license.

I encourage you to check out the whole story here:

Useful open source tools: the little things add up

In-context, on-page editing in React, Vue, Svelte and other frameworks

Tom Boutell — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 13:02:00 +0000

Dear fans of React, Vue, Svelte and other frontend frameworks:

How do you feel about the way these integrate in CMS projects? Is on-page editing an important feature for you? Would you prefer to solve that in the context of a full-featured frontend framework, like NextJS or Astro? Or do you just want the CMS to let you write all your templates in React instead of a legacy template language?

Thanks for your feedback!

My Journey with the OpenAI API

Tom Boutell — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 17:38:44 +0000

A few months ago I had the chance to speak to my sister's class of eighth graders about AI — which made this talk for adults at Philly Tech Week much better. If you need an overview that gets really basic before digging into how you can integrate it yourself, I think I can help. Thanks to Apostrophe for supporting my work on this and to Philly Tech Week for having me!

Hey, how much memory did that command take?

Tom Boutell — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 13:19:40 +0000

Last week my customer had a problem. Their custom webpack build was working fine on a spiffy developer Mac, but fell over when running on a deployment server. I could see an out of memory error, but how much RAM did this thing really need? Adding more "iron" in the form of a bigger AWS instance was a possible solution, but how much iron exactly?

I knew I could watch the output of the top command, and sort it by "resident set size," a fancy technical term for "how much memory this process really needs, not counting shared stuff." But I also knew the webpack build would "fork" a lot of child processes with their own memory requirements, and besides, who wants to stare at the screen for several minutes? Don't blink, you might miss the magic moment!

This made me think of the time command. time is a classic Unix command that tells you how much time another command takes to run:

 ~ $ time sleep 5

real    0m5.012s
user    0m0.001s
sys 0m0.004s

time is great, but what I really needed was max-mem, a command to show me the peak resident set size of my command... including all child processes.

I couldn't find it, so I whipped something up. Here's the max-mem command.

Now I can type:

max-mem npm run build

[Regular output appears here]

Max memory usage: 800MB

With the help of max-mem, I was able to tell my customer exactly how much it would cost to upgrade the deployment server to ensure enough RAM for the webpack builds. His response: "yes please, upgrade the server! My developers can optimize RAM usage later." Problem solved.

It's written in Node.js, and samples the memory usage every 100 milliseconds by automating the ps command. Is there a better way? Maybe! Pull requests are welcome, just remember it should work on both MacOS and Linux.

Check it out and let me know what you think.