Controlling the beast

Matan Lachmish — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 16:15:49 +0000

We have all seen these happen too many times:

Every big project starts as a small one.
and a small project does not need a lot of stuff, right?

It doesn't need TESTING 🙈
It doesn't need SECURITY 🙉
It doesn't need CI/CD 🙊

Well, if you plan for this project to stay grounded and never make the leap to become a production product then you are probably right 🐒

This Byte is about another item that is usually left out until the project is too big and desperately needs it - CONTROLLING

Controlling

Every system needs a way to control its production product, for instance:

User's data
Content served by your app
Feature flags
Many more...

The greedy way

"For now, let's just create admin APIs"

Well, you do have a way to control but in the cost of:

Constant manual dev effort (the worst kind of dev effort 😉)
Inconsistent way of use, the risk of breaking something up is always high
Obscurity of implementation, APIs that are not consumed by any client can break/change without anyone knowing.
Centralized knowledge of how to control your system

The better way

Some call it "Admin Panel", others "Back office", I've heard "Dashboard" and "Console".

In Sanga we call it Control™

An easy-to-use app that provides a safe and consistent way of using those notorious "Admin APIs".

Controlling the beast at Sanga

As soon as we felt that those admin APIs are being used more than "just a couple of times" we've built our Control™ using Vue.js.

As straightforward as it may sound, our "definition of done" for a feature includes the ability to manage the feature through Control™.

That means that for every feature we:

Think what are the possible ways to control this feature
Design the relevant admin APIs
Enhance Control™ with the ability to interact with these APIs

Fun fact

Once you have such a capability, new features are being designed with control in place. That leads to some super cool capabilities that otherwise would probably be developed as stiff client-side logic that would be re-written endlessly.

Thank you for reading, look for our next Byte

Made with ❤️ by Sanga

Welcome to Sanga Bytes

Matan Lachmish — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 12:09:18 +0000

This is exciting...

Every big journey start with one small step,

and this is the very first (and very small) step of Sanga's tech blog.

Let us introduce you to our Byte size concept.

The theme of our company's tech blog is to share with the dev community the concepts we came to refine during our journey of developing Sanga.

We aim to share ideas and ignite a thought process.

You will not find tutorials, or a very detailed step by step posts on how to write your first microservice or how to use Combine with Swift UI.

Instead, you will find a very concise concept written in a Byte size format.

Meaning, no more than a couple of paragraphs and an image.

We hope that this format will increase the relevancy of each post to all sort of backgrounds and stacks.

And we are positive that reading a Byte size post is easier than a Gigabyte one.

Thank you for reading, look for our next Byte

Made with ❤️ by Sanga

DEV Community: Matan Lachmish

Controlling the beast

Controlling

The greedy way

The better way

Controlling the beast at Sanga

Fun fact

Thank you for reading, look for our next Byte

Welcome to Sanga Bytes

Let us introduce you to our Byte size concept.

Thank you for reading, look for our next Byte