Nicolas Fränkel

Last year, I started to use Excalidraw as a diagram tool. However, the SVG images didn’t display the font correctly. In this post, I’d like to explain the problem and offer a solution. Let’s create a sample drawing with Excalidraw. If you open the link, it should look something like this: However, in a browser, it looks like this: The code is straightforward: <img src='/path/to/sample.svg'> The font doesn’t display correctly. The problem is that the

I never moved away from Docker Desktop. For some time, after you use it to build an image, it prints a message: What's Next? View a summary of image vulnerabilities and recommendations → docker scout quickview I decided to give it a try. I’ll use the root commit of my OpenTelemetry tracing demo. Let’s execute the proposed command: docker scout quickview otel-catalog:1.0 Here’s the result: ✓ Image stored for indexing ✓ Indexed 272 packages Target

Last year, I wrote my first yearly retrospective. I liked the experience, so I’m trying one more time. Let the future decide if it will become a trend or not. Before diving into our safe technological world, my thoughts go to Ukraine, to my friends who had to flee their own country, to other friends who fought on the front to defend it from an imperial power, and to all victims of an old kleptocrat who clings to power despite the cost to others. The free world needs to support Ukraine mor

In early 2021, I started to work on the Apache APISIX project. I have to admit that I had never heard about it before. In this post, I’d like to introduce some Apache projects that are less well-known than HTTPD or Kafka. Apache APISIX APISIX is an API Gateway. It builds upon OpenResty, a Lua layer built on top of the famous nginx reverse-proxy. APISIX adds abstractions to the mix, e.g., Route, Service, Upstream, and offers a plugin-based architecture. Lots of plugins are provided ou

Apache APISIX is an API Gateway, which builds upon the OpenResty reverse-proxy to offer a plugin-based architecture. The main benefit of such an architecture is that it brings structure to the configuration of routes. It’s a help at scale, when managing hundreds or thousands of routes. In this post, I’d like to describe how plugins, priority, and phases play together and what pitfalls you must be aware of. APISIX plugin’s priority When you configure a route with multiple p

In a few words, the idea of canary releases is to deliver a new software version to only a fraction of the users, analyze the results, and decide whether to proceed further or not. If results are not aligned with expectations, roll back; if they are, increase the number of users exposed until all users benefit from the new version. In this post, I’d like to detail this introduction briefly, explain different ways to define the fraction, and show how to execute it with Apache APISIX. Int

In my previous post Chopping the Monolith, I explained that some parts of a monolith are pretty stable and only the fast-changing parts are worth being 'chopped.' I turned the post into a talk and presented it at several conferences. I think it’s pretty well received; I believe it’s because most developers understand, or have direct experience, that microservices are not a good fit for traditional organizations, as per Conway’s Law. In the talk, I use an e-commerce webapp as a

The OpenTelemetry Collector sits at the center of the OpenTelemetry architecture but is unrelated to the W3C Trace Context. In my tracing demo, I use Jaeger instead of the Collector. Yet, it’s ubiquitous, as in every OpenTelemetry-related post. I wanted to explore it further. In this post, I explore the different aspects of the Collector: The data kind: logs, metrics, and tracesPush and pull modelsOperations: reads, transformations, and writes First steps A long time ago, observabilit

In my previous post Evolving your APIs, I mention the main API versioning approaches. During the talk of the same name, I sometimes get some questions on the subject. In this post, I’ll detail each of them. I assume readers know the reasons behind versioning, semantic versioning, and product lifecycle. If not, I encourage you to read a bit about these themes; in particular, chapter 24 of the excellent API Design Patterns book focuses on them. I’ll summarize the subject in a few wo

I got plenty of feedback on my post about Calling Rust from Python: Hacker News/r/python/r/rust Many comments mentioned pyo3, and I should use it instead of cooking my own. Thanks to the authors, I checked: in this post, I explain what it is and how I migrated my code. What is pyo3? Rust bindings for Python, including tools for creating native Python extension modules. Running and interacting with Python code from a Rust binary is also supported. — PyO3 user guide Indeed, pyo3