One of the things many developers love about MongoDB and other NoSQL databases is the ability to store flexible objects in their native format. When you walk around the office singing its praises, experienced developers chime in and tell you that this is a quick path...

If you have ever had to export pictures from any of the major image editing software (Photoshop etc) then you will know that there are quite a few image types you can use. What many people don't know is when to use each format, and what some formats can do that others...

Recently I have been a small part of a team at OptimalBI building a new Angular app. When we approached the point where we wanted to start deploying on AWS I did the standard thing I have always done; create a S3 bucket, setup the bucket for hosting static sites,...

API Gateway is a fantastic tool in the AWS Cloud toolkit. If you're building serverless applications, creating functions that you don't want to manage the servers for, or integrating many different services (AWS or otherwise) API Gateway chips in with a...

Scaling is a large part of why running applications in the cloud is a good idea, but the different approaches to scaling are often not talked about in much detail. So I thought I would quickly cover off some of the options when it comes to scaling on AWS (though these...

Chatbots are still a hot topic, and can be a great way to develop a more natural interfaces for our applications. They can be quite a interesting way to make a computer do fun stuff without the need to train users or assume knowledge, but as per usual with hot trends...

MongoDB Atlas is a topic of conversation for many of the people who use MongoDB on a day-to-day basis, so I thought that I would quickly throw together a blog outlining what Atlas is and when/why you should use it. What MongoDB Atlas is MongoDB's managed MongoDB as a...

MongoDB 3.6 has some awesome features, change streams being my personal favourite (see all the changes here), but what if we have an old MongoDB cluster running on 3.4 and want to use these cool features? Here is how! Note: This guide assumes you installed MongoDB...

MongoDB is a very popular database, in fact, we love blogging about it. But what is MongoDB? And what are the best things to do with it, and what shouldn't I do with it? I get asked this a lot so here are the answers to these questions. Don't worry if you're not a...

Recently The Cloud at OptimalBI has taken a more bluish tinge. We have always liked a little Microsoft here at OptimalBI Ltd with our C#s and our SQL Servers, and as such our ventures over to the land of the long blue cloud were inevitable. Azure is one of the fastest...

As a developer you are always taught to comment code, but often people leave out what commenting code actually means and the difference between a helpful comment and a wasteful one. Commenting for the public When you write code libraries or are writing code that code...

At OptimalBI we love Amazon Web Services (AWS). We are also partial to a bit of WordPress in our web diet at some point. Recently we have deployed WordPress in more reliable and repeatable fashion. Here is a good list of a few resources we have used to come up with...

The impending doom of python2 will shortly be upon us (for a dramatic countdown check out the Python clock), so it is time to update our python scripts to Python 3 (3.6 hopefully). Here are a few of the things that made this easier for me over here at OptimalBI. Let's...

Dealing with times can be quite annoying in programming, but not as annoying as dealing with timezones. Throw in a sprinkling of Daylight Savings Time and you have a good recipe for headaches. This headache can be very relevant if you are a cloud programmer. Cloud...

When we deploy and run applications on AWS (or anywhere really) most times we need to configure that application so that it can find the other services and applications it needs to run correctly. Today I will look at a the simple way of using config files deployed to...

Capturing and storing data of one thing changing over time is called time series data. When we capture time series data we are more interested in trends and change than the current state of a 'thing'. Storing and querying this type of data can present...

Auto scaling is an old selling point for AWS and cloud services in general, but a surprising number of production applications don't auto-scale. There are several legitimate reasons for this: Applications have a very fixed input/output and have no reason to scale....

Recently I have had the chance to muck around with the new DotNet Core in AWS Lambda. Here is a few things I have learnt and can hopefully save you the time and trouble of struggling over. DotNet Core Version AWS Love keeping AWS Lambda on annoyingly old versions of...