Round Robin DNS

In a previous post, I’ve covered how I used Digital Ocean’s load balancer to handle the increasing number of request my Weather Extension receives. For weeks everything was going great but about a month ago I started...

Led Monitor Backlights

With the purchase of my new Dell 34 inch monitor , I decided to add some led backlights to the monitor. I’ve read some of the benefits but wasn’t sure if I would like them. After a few days of use, I would definitely...

Dell 34 Ultra Wide Monitor Review (U3417W)

My primary monitor for the past several years has been the Dell U2412M , a 24 inch ultra sharp 1920×1200. It has been a great monitor and it has served me well. I recently was able to sell it to a friend and decided...

Easy Smoothie Recipe

A recent Freakonomics episode on the dangers of sugar, spark the idea for me to share my fruit smoothie recipe I’ve been making for the past 2 years. If you struggle with drinking sugary drinks, switching to fruit...

DigitalOcean Load Balancers

Performance and reliability are two key factors that contribute to a user being happy when using a website/app. They tend to not be forgiving when a website fails to load especially when it comes to browser...

How to Market Browser Extensions

For the past year and a half I’ve been testing different ways to market my Weather Extension. Currently Weather has over 125,000 users. Here are some of the strategies that have worked well for me: Share the...

Nginx Real Time Metrics

To get a better idea of how my server for Weather was handling request, I needed a way to get some insights into nginx. I wanted to calculate request per second and routes being accessed. I came across a great tool...

Ways to Improve Laravel Performance

Over the past few months my Weather Extension has grown to over 118,000+ users and averages 14 req/sec. Weather uses Laravel primarily as an api and VueJs to render the html. Speed is very important. Currently...

Zero Downtime Laravel Forge Deploys

So you’re a Laravel developer and of course you are using Forge to manage your servers. You enjoy how simple Forge makes it to deploy your applications but you may notice a few seconds of downtime when your app is...

What is Flexbox

If you are a web developer you probably have heard of Flexbox . Flexbox is becoming the new way to layout web pages and solves some of the issues when using floats. When considering using new features, you should...