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    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    Setting User-Specific Resource Limits with systemd

    Seth Jensen

    By Seth Jensen
    February 3, 2024

    In the center of a dim street lined with houses and cars, the sun illuminates and sillhouettes green foliage. It projects a triangle of light on the ground, first the street and then the grass, centered in the frame. On either side of the light, centered verticaly, a white car catches the light.

    We recently encountered an issue on one of our servers where some processes were hogging CPU time and slowing down the entire machine to unusable speeds. It turned out that a couple of our developers were using the VS Code extension “Remote - SSH,” which gets SSH credentials to a server from you, logs in by SSH, figures out what kind of server it’s running on, and runs some server-side components that it talks to.

    This is fine in principle, but with larger projects it frequently spins out of control and eats up all available CPU and RAM on the server. The developer using VS Code on their desktop likely won’t even notice, leaving a system administrator to kill the VS Code processes after it causes issues for other users.

    Our answer to this problem was setting resource limits. In many cases, you could use ulimit to control a user’s resource limits. But ulimit only controls resources for the shell it’s running in, and since VS Code was connecting through SSH and spawning a bunch of processes, we didn’t have a reasonable way to do this.

    Instead of using ulimit, you can use control groups (cgroups) to set overall user limits, not just limits …


    linux sysadmin systemd vscode

    Building a real-time application with SignalR, .NET, and three.js

    Bimal Gharti Magar

    By Bimal Gharti Magar
    January 13, 2024

    A white watchface, without any other parts, sits on a surface with a dotted texture
    Image by Pixabay on Pexels

    When data in a web application is changing in real time, users want to see those updates reflected in real time without refreshing the application. Adding real-time functionality to a .NET application is easy with the SignalR library.

    Depending on the capabilities of the client and server, SignalR can use WebSockets, server-sent events, or long polling to establish a persistent connection between the client and the server. From the server side, SignalR pushes code to connected clients. SignalR is good for applications that require high-frequency updates from the server, such as real-time gaming.

    C# code can be used to write SignalR hubs, which easily integrate with other ASP.NET features like dependency injection, authentication, authorization, and scalability.

    What we’ll build

    We will learn how to use SignalR for real-time communication to send the camera position of a cube, built using three.js, to all users on the page.

    Two browser windows are open side by side, to the same web app. On both, under a “Receiver” title is a window showing a 3D cube, after which a “Controller” title is followed by a “Request Control” button. In the left browser window, the mouse clicks the blue “Request Control” button, which turns green and displays a message underneath saying “Control granted: 120 seconds remaining”, with the number counting down every second. Another identical 3D cube window opens beneath. The clicks and drags in this bottom window, which rotates the cube. After a short delay, the other two cubes in the “Receiver” section follow and move to the position where the controller moved the cube.

    You can see the demo here.

    Here is the description of our testing app:

    • A user can request control of a cube for 2 minutes
    • Control can be released manually, or it will be automatically released after 2 minutes
    • A user can control …

    dotnet javascript

    End Point meetup in Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Jon Jensen

    By Jon Jensen
    December 29, 2023

    5 men smiling for the camera outside against classic pillar and walls

    Remote-first work

    End Point has always been a primarily remote work company. We have offices in Manhattan, New York City and Johnson City, Tennessee, yet the people who work in them mostly interact online with remote colleagues.

    Most of the time that is wonderful because we have no commute if we work at home, or as short of a commute as we want for those who work in a nearby office or co-working space. We are also able to move without changing jobs. And our meetings with clients are usually remote in any case.

    International interaction

    Perhaps best of all, working remote-first has allowed us to work together with colleagues around the world: currently in 13 countries and as many time zones. That is pretty good international representation for a company of 70 people.

    A downside of mostly remote work is that we generally have to make an effort to ever meet each other in person. And while remote meetings are convenient, they lack some impact that in-person meetings have. There is especially a big difference between meeting remotely with someone you have never met, and someone you’ve met in person at least once!

    So we try to meet up with our co-workers when we are at all …


    company conference remote-work travel

    Client Profile: J.G. Title Company

    Juan Pablo Ventoso

    By Juan Pablo Ventoso
    December 27, 2023

    The J.G. Title Company logo sits in the center of an image on a blue background with futuristic designs reminiscent of circuit boards. Text on either side of the logo reads “Nationwide titling”, with text under reading “info@jgtitleco.com” and “https://jgtitleco.com”

    J.G. Title is a prominent service company specializing in automotive dealership titling and registration processes across the country. They simplify operations for their dealers, businesses, and individuals by giving tax/fee quotes, document validation, and checklists for all jurisdictions.

    Jordan Kivett, the owner of J.G. Title, envisioned an innovative web application to simplify dealership operations. He contacted us to request a quote for developing this solution and making his vision a reality. This project became a great opportunity for our .NET team to build a robust system with state-of-the-art technologies functioning seamlessly together.

    The solution

    J.G. Title submitted a detailed document containing a description of the requirements for the J.G. Title Suite app along with workflow diagrams explaining their current business processes. After analyzing all the documents and having some initial meetings, we decided to divide the project into different stages, and estimate each phase of work separately. We ended up with three phases:

    • Phase I: Create a product that allows users to enter deals into the system and retrieve the quote estimation, including taxes, fees, and …

    dotnet development clients case-study saas

    Developers: Time and Teamwork

    Greg Hanson

    By Greg Hanson
    December 4, 2023

    A steep golden hillside interspersed with green shrubs, behind power lines. Above the hill is a half moon on a deep blue sky.

    Time and teamwork. How do these two concepts fit together? The focus of this post is how blending them can improve not only your programming skills, but also your timeline of projects.

    For a recent project I am the project manager of, we had an urgent request from a client for a developer who could be available in the next 2 weeks to work on a project that had about a 6 week timeline.

    The project

    Initially, it seemed like a pretty easy request to fill. We had a developer who had worked previously for this client, in the very same environment, albeit on a different project. So the roadmap was there: Get the developer into the systems, get the requirements, and do the work.

    This client, like many, had some specific barriers to entry, like needing a company email address, access through a VPN, Duo 2FA, familiarity with Monday.com tracking, Office 365, Microsoft Teams for meetings, and so forth. But, as mentioned, the dev we would be using had worked previously in this environment, and so we already had most of the above in place.

    So we got started with the first few initiation meetings, getting the basics of the project laid out, tasks assigned, and timeline established.

    Then Mr. …


    tips development

    Domain Move Considerations

    Josh Ausborne

    By Josh Ausborne
    November 30, 2023

    Photo taken of and from the Mormon Row Homestead at Grand Teton National Park. Photo is taken facing WNW, and has an old home and barn in the foreground with the jagged, rocky peaks of the Teton mountain range in the background.

    In 2021 we moved to a new internet domain. We had been on endpoint.com for 26 years, so a lot of things were tied to that domain!

    As we expected, there were a lot of little details to deal with. We found the switch to be a bit overwhelming until we started listing things out, at which time we realized that a divide-and-conquer approach would make it achievable.

    A domain move is not an extremely common experience for a company to go through, but it’s not unheard of, either, due to acquisitions, mergers, or rebranding like ours. So we want to share our notes from our move to endpointdev.com in case they are helpful to others considering their own move.

    How long did we reserve for the move, in calendar time? We planned to work on it over 6 months, but in the end we were done in about 3 months.

    Make a schedule

    Look at your calendar. Mark any major company or personal events that you do not want any infrastructure disruption around. Block out busy periods, major holidays and vacations, etc. This will help you be realistic about how much time various people can spend on this, and how you can minimize problems for the company by choosing when to break things, or at least risk breaking …


    tips

    JSforce: A Quick Path to Salesforce Development

    Couragyn Chretien

    By Couragyn Chretien
    October 21, 2023

    A completely clear blue sky is broken by a desert mountain with exposed light rock, covered partly by striking green trees and bushes. Above the mountain is a half-moon.

    Using JavaScript with JSforce can get you working on a Salesforce project quickly if you don’t have a Salesforce expert on hand. It provides easy access to Salesforce’s API, which will allow you to focus on development instead of learning a new system.

    No Salesforce learning curve

    Apex is a platform-specific language created so that developers can interact with Salesforce classes/​objects and write custom code. Apex allows you to do some cool things such as directly triggering custom Apex code based on an action in Salesforce.

    The problem with Apex is that it is its own world, with its own IDEs, deployment processes, etc. There’s a steep learning curve to getting up to speed with the Apex ecosphere.

    JSforce is a wrapper/​abstraction of the Salesforce API. It allows you to do a lot, like search, perform CRUD actions, and even send emails. These functions aren’t as streamlined as their built-in Apex counterpart, but JSforce allows any JS developer to jump right into the code without wasting costly training time.

    Using JSforce CLI

    Below are some examples of connecting and performing basic CRUD operations.

    Connecting

    Installation:

    $ npm install jsforce -g …

    javascript salesforce api

    Building Ecommerce Search Using Algolia

    Dylan Wooters

    By Dylan Wooters
    October 12, 2023

    Looking east from the top of the Berkeley hills over the Briones Reservoir. Rolling hills are seen in the distance with the sun setting to the west.

    A common request that developers receive when embarking on a new website project is for the website to have “Google-like search.” For many years, this meant writing custom code to replicate the intelligent and user-friendly aspects of Google search, which was no easy feat. However, now we have many search-as-a-service offerings that do the hard work for us and make this process much easier.

    In this blog post, we’ll dive into one of these search-as-a-service platforms, Algolia. We recently worked on an ecommerce website and used Algolia in an interesting way, both as a search engine and as a lightweight backend database to hold product data managed in Salesforce. Algolia worked beautifully, offering users fast and accurate search results, and also allowing us to launch the site within a relatively short time frame.

    We will look at how to load Algolia with data, configure search options, and connect the search to the frontend using Algolia’s Vue library.

    Loading the index with data

    To start using Algolia’s search, you need to load up an index with data. You have the option of manually uploading a JSON file, or using Algolia’s API to programmatically load records. For …


    search vue typescript
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