DEV Community: Guga Cavalieri

Running in the Cloud? Watch out for low port numbers!

Guga Cavalieri — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 12:22:01 +0000

Every day we see more and more applications running in the Cloud. And I bet that at least 70% of them are sending some kind of email to its users.

Most of the email providers (SendGrid, SendInBlue, SES...) support sending emails using the SMTP protocol, and they expose a bunch of ports for us to do it (25, 587, 2525).

The big problem here is that most of the cloud providers block or impose some sort of throttling on low port numbers to protect against abuse. And this can cause big problems if we are not careful.

The other day we had a big queue of emails to be processed and we started seeing some Connection Refused errors in our monitoring tool. Weirdly, some of the emails were going through while others were going back to the queue and throwing errors.

As the queue grew bigger we found out that AWS throttles outgoing traffic on port 25 and other low port numbers. It was time for us to review some of the port numbers we were using for SMTP and change it to 587, which is the recommended value by SendGrid.

So just a heads up! If you are running in the Cloud it's good to be careful with outgoing and incoming traffic on low port numbers otherwise some users might never see receive your emails or messages ;)

References:

Como eu organizo meu dia de trabalho (also in EN)

Guga Cavalieri — Sun, 30 Aug 2020 16:28:49 +0000

THIS POST WAS ALSO WRITTEN IN: 🇨🇦️ ENGLISH

Todos os dias, antes de começar a trabalhar, eu sempre reservo 5-10 minutos para planejar o meu dia. Isso envolve fazer uma lista de todas as tarefas que eu quero terminar naquele dia incluindo:

Qualquer tarefa que estou trabalhando na Kudos
Tarefas pessoais
Coisas de casa
Algum Hobby (Música, Leitura, Podcasts...)
Qualquer outra coisa que esteja na minha cabeça (que provavelmente eu dormi com ela na cabeça).

E foi assim que eu comecei a organizar o meu dia!

As ferramentas mágicas

1. ElementaryOS

Tenho que dizer que sou um grande fan do Linux e especialmente um mega fan do ElementaryOS. Acho que posso dizer que é a minha distribuição favorita nos últimos 3 anos pois além de ser linda é super fácil de usar e se adaptar (sem contar que é open-source e gratuita).

2. Planner

E por usar o ElementaryOS no meu dia-a-dia nos últimos anos eu acabei descobrindo uma ferramenta super legal chamada Planner.

Vou listar aqui as funcionalidades do Planner que me salvam todos os dias:

Separar taferas por projetos (Trabalho, Pessoal, Casa, etc...)
Criar tarefas recorrentes (Pagar o aluguel todo mês por exemplo)
Colocar prazos
Criar sub-tarefas
Sincronizar na núvem (Caso eu queira acessar algo do celular)
O mais importante: Listar todas as tarefas que estão marcadas para serem entregues no dia de hoje 🎉️ 🚀️

Como eu uso o Planner

Simples assim: Antes de começar qualquer coisa no dia eu abro o "Planner" e escrevo tudo que eu quero terminar até o apagar das luzes.

A medida que as tarefas são feitas elas são marcadas como concluídas e se algo fica inacabado eu simplesmente clico em um botão e a envio para o dia seguinte. E isso vai ser a primeira coisa que eu verei quando abrir o meu computador na próxima manhã.

Tente você mesmo

Antes de começar o seu dia, reserve um tempinho para escrever tudo que você quer entregar naquele dia. E não importa se você está usando o Planner ou qualquer outra ferramenta. O importante é escrever porque uma vez que você escreveu você magicamente sentirá que acabou de se comprometer a fazer algo.

Bonus

Se você não usa o ElementaryOS ou o Planner aqui vão algumas outras ferramentas que podem te ajudar:

📰️ Um Caderno (Sim! Clássico e efetivo)
Todoist
Google Keep
Trello
Notion

Quais outras dicas vocês têm para planejar/organizar o seu dia?

How do I organize my work day (+Tools)

Guga Cavalieri — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 14:35:29 +0000

Every day, before getting into work, I always take 5-10 minutes to plan my day. That involves listing all the tasks that I want to get done in:

The current sprint at Kudos
Personal errands
Home tasks
Any hobby (music, reading, podcasts...)
Any other thing that is on my mind

And here it's how I do it!

First things first (The magic tools)

1. ElementaryOS

I have to say that I am a fan of Linux and especially a big fan of ElementaryOS. It looks incredibly beautiful and it is so easy to use that I don't feel like using any other OS these days.

2. Planner

And by using ElementaryOS in my day-to-day work I came across a task manager called Planner.

Here are some features that I find very very useful:

Put each task into its project (Work, Personal, Home)
Set subtasks to each task
Create recurring tasks
Set deadlines
Cloud Sync if I need to access it from my phone (Todoist)
Most important: List all the tasks that are due to Today 🎉️ 🚀️

How I use it

Simple as that: Before starting my day I open "Planner" and write down everything that I need to get done by the end of the day.

As the tasks get done I check them off the list and if something does not get finished I just reschedule it for the next day. That will be the first I will see in the morning when opening my computer.

Try it for yourself

Before starting your day, try taking some time to write down what you need to get done. And it doesn't matter if you are using ElementaryOS, Planner or any other tool. Just write it down because once you do it you feel like you just committed to something.

Bonus

If you don't use ElementaryOS or Planner here are some tools to achieve the same effect:

📰️ Notebook (classy and effective)
Todoist
Google Keep

What other tips do you have to plan/organize your daily routine?

Install latest version of Ruby and Rails using Snap

Guga Cavalieri — Fri, 22 May 2020 21:30:22 +0000

I just started working with a new stack today and it involves a lot of techs that I have never worked with (Ruby, Rails).

I was having a hard time to create a new project with Rails 6.x mostly because the Ruby installed in my Ubuntu via apt-get was pointing to version 2.4.5.

I needed something newer ... And snapd was there to rescue me.

By running:

gustavo@bulls:~$ snap install ruby

and

gustavo@bulls:~$ ruby -v
ruby 2.7.1p83 (2020-03-31 revision a0c7c23c9c) [x86_64-linux]

I finally got the newest version of Ruby and could finally do:

gustavo@bulls:~$ gem install rails
...
gustavo@bulls:~$ rails -v
Rails 6.0.3.1

Thank you snap. Well, here are some advantages of using ruby with snap:

Keep ruby and rail in a separate sandbox preserving your OS packages.
You can always get the latest version even if your OS do not provide them (don't be angry Arch Users)
Easy to install/remove without breaking anything :)

Well, here is the blog post from Ruby blog!

Any other tips for today guys?

[JS] This command will help you to free some disk space

Guga Cavalieri — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 13:58:31 +0000

My work laptop has an small SSD Disk (128 GB) so I often receive some system notifications alerting me that my /home is running low on disk space.

After some digging I found out that many projects under my /dev folder had a node_modules folder inside eating up a bunch of space.

So I needed a magical command to remove these folders recursively and here is what I found in my first Google search result:

Clear all node_modules Directories | Mac and Linux

Open your terminal.
Browse to your master project directory or the top level of where you have a bunch of projects stored.
Run the command: find . -name "node_modules" -type d -prune -exec rm -rf '{}' +

(Optional) Create an alias (node-modules-clean)

This helped to free up 5GB on my SSD. Hope it helps you too :)

Source: rtmccormick.com

How to access your localhost application on any device

Guga Cavalieri — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 16:01:51 +0000

I have always had problems while trying to test my applications on my localhost machine. The process was so painful that I would have to do some crazy port forwarding on my router (yes, using my internet provider public IP) or even deploy to staging environment server and access it on the desired device (sadly I did it once 😢).

This was until the other day when my coworker (many thanks to Tays) came to me with a magical solution called ngrok. In a nutshell, ngrok exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels.

What?? I didn’t catch a thing there!

So, all it does, it takes a port on your computer and forwards it to ngrok’s server. This port is linked to a public URL that can be accessed anywhere in the world by any device!

Wait! Isn’t it dangerous to do that?

Well, we should be safe if we stick to only testing APIs and debugging web apps. We can deploy any application/API on our localhost, expose it using ngrok and then turn it off. And for those who are really worried about security, ngrok has an option to create a password protected tunnel. On top of that, every tunnel is secured through the HTTPS protocol.

My favourite use cases (so far) ❤:

Test Web Apps using My Phone before deploying any code to the server
Debug OAuth integrations with external services
Many more! ❤