Tag: technical
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Save yourself time: Set the JVM TTL for DNS name lookups in AWS
I like to keep track of times I’m one of the lucky 10,000. Had such an instance today with the JDK and DNS behavior. Apparently most versions of the JDK cache DNS lookups indefinitely. If that’s not surprising to you, I’m guessing you’ve had a weekend debugging session similar to mine. I can’t be the…
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My Thoughts on Kotlin: Perspectives after 4 years
Often, when explaining to other devs that Masset uses Kotlin as our primary backend language, I receive inquisitive and questioning faces. “The Android language? On your backend? That seems odd… Have you considered rewriting it in Rust?” 🤨 In response, I’ve often found myself struggling to elaborate what it is that I specifically like about…
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Multi-tenant SAML in an afternoon (using SSOReady)
tldr; I took SSOReady up on their marketing tagline of “SAML in an afternoon”. Overall, it was a positive experience and despite not quite having a production-ready deployment in an afternoon, I think their tagline is a fair approximation of effort. Introduction Enterprise SSO logins are a weird dictomony. Implementing something like OIDC or SAML…
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Protecting ECS Tasks From Scale-In
As part of the Masset digital asset management platform, we sometimes need to run tasks that take a long time. For example, when someone uploads a video, we may need to resize it to a few different sizes or extract the audio from it. Originally we used AWS Lamdba for this because it allowed dynamic…
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Resolving downtime during rolling Single Page Application deployments
This is the first post in a two-part series on how Masset identified and removed downtime when deploying it’s React-based Single Page Application (SPA) frontend. TLDR: Container-based static sites suffer from downtime when using rolling deployments. We can use a CDN (Cloudfront in this case) to mitigate the issue and get some fringe benefits in…
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Week 10: Don’t buy into the unfounded spam
The age-old adage states that if you win the lottery, keep it a secret. Once it’s public knowledge, the vultures start circling. Unfortunately, after raising a round of funding, you don’t keep it secret. In fact, it often benefits you to shout it from the rooftops. I expected an increase in inbound spam once we…
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Week 9: Masset’s Boring Technology
I missed blogging for a few weeks over the holiday season (ie sickness season), but we’re finally back in good health and in the full swing of things again. Coming back, I thought it’d be fun to document Masset’s early tech stack. It’s bound to evolve over time, so tracking that evolution will be fun.…
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Thoughts on Pre-Seed Funding after closing Masset’s first round
Masset recently closed a round of Pre-Seed funding for 700k! You can read all about it on techbuzz.news who graciously picked up the story. I won’t lie, given the current economic situation, raising anything feels like a great success. I’m extremely grateful to our investors have taken a chance on us. And believed in us…
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Week 4: You Need a Support System
At 5:30 PM on my last day of W2 employment, I wrapped up a final few emails, said a couple last goodbyes and closed my laptop. Then, I sat and stared at two blank monitors for a few moments. “What am I doing?” I thought. “I can’t start a company. Most startups fail. The numbers…