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Starting with microservice design, it’s easy to follow your old habits of designing each microservice as if it was a normal application. One aspect of this, that I fell into when first moving to microservice applications, was adding authentication to my microservices that were only accessible from internal systems.

The level in which you secure your microservices is dependent on your infrastructure, who will be using the microservices, and the availability of the microservice. Not all microservices need authentication. The simplest example to point to is a memcache server. When your service is running internally and is only used by your applications, authentication may not be required. The same goes for transport encryption, but I usually implement TLS in the unlikely case of routing errors and because most HTTP libraries will have support for it already.

With Docker, it’s easy to end up with images many times larger than they need to be. Even if you remove unnecessary files and packages, you’ll still see your image size be much larger than expected. The size of the image may not seem too important to some, but there are many benefits to having smaller docker images.

A smaller image will allow you to upload and download the images faster. When deploying your apps, the time difference between a 3GB and a 150MB image is very noticeable. Containers are meant to be as lightweight and small as possible. Along with the time saved when deploying, you are also saving disk space. Disk space is cheap but the IO cost behind it can be expensive.

No matter what operating system you are using, there are at least a few default application installed. Most the time you won’t need all of the default apps and will uninstall them. Chrome OS is pretty good at allowing you to uninstall the majority of default apps with only around four that are permanently installed. But eventually you might need some of those default apps back that you uninstalled and can’t find them. Below is a list of all of the default apps that come packaged with Google Chrome OS. Some manufacturers might package additional apps with their Chromebook , but those apps won’t be listed below.

Google Analytics allows you to opt-out of being tracked by using a web browser extension. Besides the issue with having to install software to opt-out of being tracked, their opt-out extension can easily be bypassed by web developers who want to continue to track you. I personally don’t condone developers bypassing the opt-out extension (and it’s most likely against Analytics’ terms of service) but it’s important for people to know that the opt-out extension doesn’t work and the true method to block Google Analytics is to create a firewall rule, a fake DNS entry, or use any of these other methods mentioned in our earlier post.

Today I’m releasing a pack of custom shortcodes for Hugo. A shortcode is a special tag added to a post that will embedded content or add HTML to a post instead of having to manually add the HTML. A few examples of shortcodes include YouTube, Vimeo, and GitHub Gists. The pack I created adds the ability to embed Google Maps, Box Document Preview, Pastebin, Twitch videos, Twitch livestreams, and JSFiddle. I’m going to keep adding new shortcodes in the future as I come across new sites that will work well with shortcodes.