DEV Community: Sharesquare engineering bits

SRE for the SaaS

Sharesquare engineering bits — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 16:14:08 +0000

In latest new blog story we take a close look at what Site Reliability Engineering means for the modern Software-as-a-Service solution, particularly in the Microsoft Azure world.

We will share specific pointers to classic SRE practices, starting from a healthy and fully automated CI/CD pipeline, but go a little deeper too covering things like security and redundancy.

A dep dive into (our own) CI/CD pipelines

Sharesquare engineering bits — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 13:41:05 +0000

In this new story by our team, a sneak peek into our own CI/CD pipelines at Sharesquare. The workflows are powered by Github Actions and the destination is an Azure webapp (or more, as you will see).

Whether you are on an oldschool LAMP and seeking some advice on modernizing your rollout the Azure way, or just wanna get some tips on useful things to check at release time, this story is for you!

Homemade Caching - pt. 2

Sharesquare engineering bits — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:07:21 +0000

In the second part of the story describing our Homemade Caching strategy in Laravel, we delve into even more succulent and technical details around cache invalidation and refreshing.

With this second part, we complete our most advanced story so far! It took us a month of work to get it to work perfectly, but if you follow the stories it will take you just a couple of hours!

If you have not yet read the first part, start there.

Homemade Caching

Sharesquare engineering bits — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:42:25 +0000

It it almost never a good idea to reinvent the wheel, but if you really have a need a patch it rather than reinventing it... maybe it will work!

In our latest story we present an elegant caching layer we developed in Laravel, and we do so not without pride.

Update. The second part of the story is published!

The Human Touch in Software Testing

Sharesquare engineering bits — Fri, 10 May 2024 12:17:37 +0000

In our latest story we share a short reflection on the vital contribution of a Q&A team member.

We argue that the human touch of a flesh-and-bone Quality Assurance (or testing, in general) specialist is not really replaceable by agents of bots.

When traits conflict

Sharesquare engineering bits — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:21:54 +0000

In our latest story we show a couple of smart ways to get around some import conflicts in PHP.

Especially when classes get bigger and more powerful in your codebase, keeping things clean and well-studied is the key to guarantee maintainability.

Realizing an RBAC scheme in Laravel Nova

Sharesquare engineering bits — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 12:12:19 +0000

Laravel Nova is the administration panel solution for the Laravel framework, and you know that when it comes to administration, you want to have a tight grip on who is doing what.

In this story we have a look at a practical implementation example, with a step-by-step approach based on Laravel natives, so that you will be able to realize your RBAC scheme in No(va) time!

Observing your integrity

Sharesquare engineering bits — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 12:57:51 +0000

In enterprise applications, maintaining integrity in complex situations, when the state can be modified by different agents in multiple ways, is essential.

Our full-stack specialist Umer shares a golden nugget: how to address this elegantly and idiomatically in Laravel. Full story here!

Before you modify the domain model and break production, be careful

Sharesquare engineering bits — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:57:25 +0000

Evolving a complex and stratified domain model takes quite some energy: due to a considerable amount of legacy developments, you cannot just light heartedly change your classes and hope for good.

Our backend specialist Rohit will break it down for us a little, giving some practical explanation plus code snippets! See the story here.

SSHing your way into AppService

Sharesquare engineering bits — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 13:54:15 +0000

When we started to migrate our core platform from a single virtual machine on DigitalOcean to a managed webapp solution on Azure, AppService, the first question was: can we recycle our CI/CD flows?

The answer was: yes! Together with fellow cloud engineer @ayoayomide , let us tell you how we did it! See the full story here.

Spoiler alert. We could keep our SSH-based deployment pipeline, written in Deployer, yet we had to enable and patch a rather hidden SSH feature in the Azure AppService itself.