Chris 
One of my projects that runs 24x7x365 is a web scraper. I’ve iterated on the approach several times, and what is currently working is to do the fetch and then save the entire HTTP response in a Postgres database. From various other projects, I can then query one central database and extract out data that … Read more
When your server is down, it’s stressful. I’ve just recovered from an issue with WordPress where the PHP container was crippling my server because – for reasons I cannot explain – connectivity to the database had just died. This actually happened to me on another server a few months ago, and I wasn’t that bothered … Read more
In this post, we’ll explore how to use Spring Boot and Spring Security to manage access control for our application. Specifically, we’ll look at how to set up user roles to restrict access to certain pages based on the role of the currently logged-in user. This approach makes sure that only authorised users can view … Read more
In this blog post, we’re going to explore what seems like a fairly straightforward process at first glance: adding basic form login to a Spring Boot app. However, as with most things in the Spring Boot and Spring Security ecosystem, it’s rarely as simple as it sounds. There are several hurdles we will encounter on … Read more
Short and sweet for this one. I had a failing cron job in Kubernetes which had run several times overnight. I wanted to delete many instances of errored pods, without having to resort to using a manual delete pod command. And the command to remove: After which they should all be terminated. Excellent.
In TypeScript, imagine you have a situation where you have an object that could be one of several different types. How do you explain to TypeScript that the object you are working with is a specific type? Not very clear? OK. Let’s see some code, and then it will likely / hopefully make more sense. … Read more
Some readers of this blog may remember me from my time making and sharing Symfony (still the best PHP framework btw) training videos. I moved on from PHP generally a good few years back, but one of the things I miss most since moving primarily to JavaScript / TypeScript is the lack of a single, … Read more
In this post, we’re going to explore how to validate an incoming JSON payload in a Spring Boot application. I wanted to use this exercise as a way to learn both validation, and automated testing. So we’re going to see unit tests for the validation logic in isolation, and also how this comes together with … Read more
In this post, we’re continuing with our Spring Boot guestbook example, but this time we’ll be adding persistence by integrating a PostgreSQL database. While the overall process is fairly straightforward and well-documented, there were a few things that caught me off guard along the way. One challenge I faced was integrating Spring Data repositories with … Read more
In this post, I’m going to explore the options available for someone who wants to use their computer primarily by voice. The reason for this exploration is that, last Thursday (at the time of ‘writing’), I had the misfortune of falling off my bike and breaking my collarbone. This is the first time in my … Read more