backend

Lately, I had the chance to introduce Nest.js to an existing Nx monorepo. To fit in with the rest of the microservices, I used MongoDB as a database. When using MongoDB with Nest.js, we can decide between TypeORM and Mongoose, both having a great Nest.js integration by their core team.

Many backend services need to integrate with other services via a number of protocols or API conventions. Today, we're looking at how we can simplify microservice development by mocking external gRPC endpoints with GripMock.

Installing TimescaleDB on mac is easy. Simply install Timescale via Homebrew and you're all set up. Except you're not. If you need multiple local Timescale versions or you already have installed Postgres before, you're out of luck. There's an easier way to set up PostgreSQL with Timescale on Mac and to manage multiple versions: by using Docker.

If you want to get Postgres on macOS working, you can easily use `brew install postgres`. But this way also has its drawbacks. Managing multiple versions or doing major version upgrades becomes a pain. There's an easier way to set up PostgreSQL on Mac and to manage multiple versions: installing Postgres with Docker.

Don't use the word "auth". Unless everyone knows what you're referring to. There's authentication and then there's authorization. Let's look at the definitions of both and what to do instead of "auth".

From starting a clean Mac to developing backends with Postgres with it takes some setup. At the end of this article, you'll have PostgreSQL version 12 set up on your mac, accepting local http connections with password auth.

Generic error messages suck. As a user, we encounter them all the time. “An error occurred, please try again later“. Often just to find out the problem wasn't some server outage, but something on our side. A typo in our email - and the server couldn't send that verification email, resulting in a 500 internal server error. Here's a simple but effective way to API error design.

The more complex your infrastructure the more can go wrong. Let's look at Terraform as a way to automate tedious infrastructure setup (and to make it explicit).