We recently did a half a day trekking to Makalidurga Hill, Doddabalapura, Bangalore Rural, located about 60kms from Bangalore city. India Hikes has a nice article explaining the trek, in fact we heard about this place from their article. In this post, we would like to cover a few takeaways for LiftOff as a team.

Starting together — in most planning, after multiple instructions/reminders to be on time at starting point we had couple of them who couldn’t make it on time because of working late or lack of cabs, and we were keen on making sure to not leave…

Microservices have gained immense popularity in Software Development in the last few years as they provide many benefits for Agile and DevOps teams. 🤗
Netflix, eBay, Amazon, etc have all evolved from monolithic to microservices architecture. 😮

Unlike microservices, a monolith application is built as a single, autonomous unit. This makes changes to the application slow as it affects the entire system. A modification made to a small section of code might require building and deploying an entirely new version of the software. Scaling specific functions of an application, also means you have to scale the entire application.

Microservices solve…

Summary

Docker can expedite local development environment setup. If done right, setting up development environment can be fast, really fast, really really fast.

The Premise

In one of the recent projects, we had a requirement to convert webm video to mp4. We used ffmpeg binary to do this. If using ffmpeg binary, install(on whatever OS) ffmpeg and run something like

ffmpeg -i input.webm output.mp4

This is quite straight forward on your laptop(or computer system). Although, it’s a bit complicated on at least two occasions. One, when you got to deploy the solution. Second, when you get another developer to ameliorate miseries. It’s a…

Hustle and bustle of the Christmas season have begun. Christmas is that time of the year where all of us look forward to the fresh whiff in the air of cookies, cakes, and wine. At LiftOff, this time of the year, we reflect on all of the good and the bad of the year that has passed and prepare with renewed zest for the new year.

The year 2020 started off on a high note with a lot of new projects lined up and while we were on the high ride, COVID struck and pushed us onto a series of…

This will be a series of 3 blog posts where we’ll use Celery to create workers as independent microservices and also discuss some of the implementation difficulties and their solutions. We’ll deploy this stack using Docker Swarm.

Prerequisites:

1. We’ll be using a microservice architecture. If you are new to the concept, please read about it before you proceed.
2. If you are new to Celery, you can read about it here.
3. The examples here would be in Python, but the concepts learnt here could be used in any language of your choice.
4. This blog also assumes that you are familiar with Docker…

Are you one of those developers who didn’t get notified or missed the deadline of mLab add-on being terminated by Heroku on November 10th & your application is down?

Don’t worry, we have been there at LiftOff LLC & were able to successful recover the database & bring the application back online after few weeks in Dec.

We had a product developed in 2015 that was deployed on Heroku with mLab MongoDB add-on, that was created with customer’s email as owner of the app & all the notifications about mLab shutdown on Heroku was being sent to customer, then the…

Most of the web applications have a common set of features, both basic and advanced that are more than often rewritten from scratch. Using any kind of boilerplate allows us to focus directly on the actual business logic instead of reinventing the wheel.

With this ideology in mind, we created Jumpstarter to use it as a starting point for many of our projects. Besides the obvious “jumpstart” that we get, this also facilitates code reuse and knowledge sharing within the organization.

Overview of the main components

Jumpstarter is an opinionated boilerplate for building RESTful web applications using Node.js. It uses Hapi.js as the server framework…

In this post, we’ll take a look at what Gatsby is and does and how to use Gatsby’s own GraphQL source plugin to interface with a CMS like WordPress.

Prerequisites:

1. Basic knowledge of React and UI components (a little bit of GraphQL know-how; not really necessary though for this post)
2. WordPress setup (you could use the docs or Local by Flywheel to easily spin up a WP instance)
3. A stable version (LTS) of Node.js and NPM

What is Static Site Generation (or SSG)?

Unlike server-side rendering (SSR) where everything that is needed on a page is rendered on the server at runtime and then sent down to…