Martin Van Aken

At Evoluted | Certified B Corp™, we've been using GitLab as our DevOps platform for years, and it's been fantastic. But as our Shopify client base has grown, we faced a challenge: no built-in GitLab-Shopify integration. Many developers solve this by building custom solutions. That's what I did! Over the past 6 months, I've developed an integration leveraging GitLab CI/CD and the Shopify CLI to automate theme deployments. Here's the benefit: Streamlined development workflows for Shopify stores on GitLab. It's not a silver bullet: This solution might not be as feature-rich as the official GitHub integration, but it's robust and ready to share. Calling all Shopify devs! Have you struggled with manual deployments? I'm sharing these scripts to help you improve your workflow, just like they've helped ours at Evoluted. Links to the full breakdown of the implementation: In the first comment. #shopify #gitlab #devops #ecommerce #cicd

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Junior developer: Let's name this class Fish Medior developer: Let's name this class AbstractAnimalThatLivesInWaterProxyFactoryProvider Senior developer: Let's name this class Fish

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Trouble containerizing Duende IdentityServer? This guide will get you sorted! I often see developers struggling to containerize a client application and Duende IdentityServer – it’s a bit of a jungle, full of pitfalls and traps! That’s why I’ve written this step-by-step guide, the first in a short series, to walk through the process. Complete with code examples and explanations; it’s also designed to help you navigate common problems on the way to help you gain fluency with the fundamentals 🚀 You can see it here: https://lnkd.in/de8cUdsB   It covers:   🔹 Containerizing basics, such as setting up IdentityServer and a client application in separate containers, using Docker Compose.   🔹 How to resolve pesky localhost issues caused by Docker’s network isolation.   🔹 Practical code examples using Dockerfiles and Docker Compose that show you how to build and run containers, with the complete source code included for every step 😀   As always, I’d love to know your thoughts and feedback! — I’m Tore. I help developers and businesses with Azure training and cloud project services. Need a helping hand, expert training, or a thought partner? I’m here to help! #Docker #IdentityServer #ASPNetCore #Containers

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🎉 Pura Sense Website V1.0 - Web-Based SaaS Solution 🎉 Thrilled to announce the successful handover of Pura Sense Website V1.0 to my client in Belgium! 🇧🇪 This web-based SaaS solution is designed to handle document processing and provide detailed analytics of device data reports. ✨ Key Features Include: 1. Lightning-Fast Data Scraping: Extracts data from documents in just 90 seconds! ⚡    2. Organized Data: Scraped data is stored in a specific file system, cleaned, organized, and presented neatly for ease of analysis.    3. AI-Driven Analysis: Custom AI algorithms analyze the data to predict humidity and temperature levels in indoor environments. 🌡️ This software is ideal for research organizations, small-to-large companies, schools, institutes, and large scientific research centers. 🛠️ I developed Pura Sense Website V1.0 using PHP, HTML5, CSS, and Bootstrap for the frontend, and designed a custom data scraping, organizing, and presentation layer from scratch. #Web_Application_Engineer #SaaS_Project #programming #data #AI #research #analytics #security #devops #developer #project Feel free to check it out or get in touch for more info!

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🚀 Exciting News! 🚀 I’ve just published my first npm package: 🎉 DirKit – a powerful CLI tool for effortlessly managing directory structures! 📅 This project has been on my radar for a while, but I officially kicked things off at the start of this month. The past few days were all about getting core functionalities in place. I know there are bugs and improvements that will be needed – this is my first npm package, and I'm learning a ton along the way! 😅 What is DirKit? 🤔 DirKit helps developers: 🗂️ Visualize folder hierarchies 📁 Effortlessly handle directory structures (working on it currently) 🔄 Export directory trees for easy reference (future scope) This is just the beginning – I’m excited to roll out more robust features soon! 🛠️ What I’ve Learned Through this ongoing journey, I’ve picked up some crucial skills: - 📝 File Handling in JS/TS: Handling files and directories in Node.js was a learning curve! - 📦 Publishing to npm: Finally, I’ve learned how to push packages to npm and make them available to the world. - 🔧 JavaScript/TypeScript Classes: Still grasping the ins and outs of classes in JS/TS – something I’m diving deeper into. 🌟 It's been an amazing experience so far, and I’m eager to improve DirKit with your support and feedback! 🔍 Try It Out Now! https://lnkd.in/gfRG7cg7 If you have ideas, bugs, or just want to say hello 👋 – drop a comment below! Currently, it is not open to contribution. After i create a base then contribution will be open Let’s collaborate in future and make DirKit even more powerful together! 🚀 #npm #CLItools #OpenSource #DirKit #DevLife #SoftwareDevelopment #TechCommunity #npm

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🌟 The Right Architecture for Your SaaS Platform 🌟 When it comes to building a SaaS platform, the architecture you choose can make or break your project. And guess what? The choice isn’t black and white—it depends on various factors. 🤔 Let’s talk about monolithic architecture first. It’s like a cozy studio apartment where everything you need is in one space. It’s perfect for simpler applications, quick launches, and when you want to keep things straightforward and snappy. Plus, if your team is small and you’re looking to hit the market fast, going monolithic can be like a speedboat—swift and efficient. 🏁 Now, onto microservices. Imagine a sprawling mansion with different rooms for everything. This is the go-to for complex, scalable applications that grow with your user base. If you’re planning to frequently update features, need high fault tolerance, and love the idea of using a variety of tech stacks, microservices are your best bet. It’s like having a team of specialists, each handling their own department. 🏠 For SaaS development, your choice should be tailored to the specific needs of your project, the expertise of your team, and the complexity of the application you’re dreaming up. Whether you’re a startup or a seasoned enterprise, the architecture you choose is the foundation of your service. So, choose wisely! 🧐 What’s your experience with monolithic vs. microservices architectures? Drop your thoughts below! 👇 #SaaSDevelopment #SaaSSolutions #SoftwareArchitecture #TechTalks #TechChoices #BuildingTogether

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Like any other tech enthousiast, i like conversing about AI. Although the concept of a Large Language Model (LLM) can sometimes be hard to grasp, i feel like many people are very interested in the functioning of these AI's. What is exactly that makes them so 'intelligent', and how are they created using what technology. That's why i have created this short carousel that makes an analogy between the biological intelligence we are all familiar with, and the artificial intelligence that has been taking the world by storm in the last few years. We as humans have become intelligent thanks to evolution, which is quite comparable to the 'training' that AI's undergo. The difference is that we fast-track it using computer science! Which in my opinion is awesome. And no, i didn't mean to start the 'playing as god' debate that might interfere in the future with the creation of these new super-intelligences, i just love technology. Enjoy the read!

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State management is a challenging software engineering topic. State creates dependencies, and dependencies create complexity. Therefore we need to understand how to manage state. I recently heard someone say that we should aim to remove all raw for loops from our C++ codebases and replace them with std algorithms. At first I didn’t grasp his point, but I soon began to realize that he was trying to explain that raw for loops expose state. We don’t want to expose state, instead we want to encapsulate and manage state. Managing state was the topic for my talk at the Audio Developer Conference ‘23. In this talk, I share my thoughts about it in the context of JUCE (a C++ audio software framework) applications. In audio software, we have to deal with different forms of state including global settings, presets, UI state, and application state. State must be stored and restored and must be synchronised throughout the app across different threads (at least the audio and main thread). State sometimes needs to be synchronised with other software, such as a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). There is a lot of debate about how to solve all these problems, and I’ve seen a lot of people do this in different, some good and some bad, ways. How you do it matters. It all starts by knowing the JUCE framework and understanding the fundamental JUCE objects, including the AudioProcessorValueTreeState, ApplicationProperties, Value and Vars. Knowing these objects will help you to build up a state system that suits your application. You can watch my talk now on YouTube! Go ahead, watch it, and feel free to send me a message with any question or comments afterwards. #softwaredevelopment #juce #audio #c #plugins #statemanagement

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Throwback to last year when one of my clients came worried that his website is going down. It might sound like bragging, but it took me just an hour of work followed by 2 weeks of waiting for the magic to happen. ... So what happened ? Why did the website start going down and what solved it? He wanted to maximize his earnings, placed 10+ ads on each page, replacing the 5 ads he used to have. Yeah, the earnings increased at first then they started GOING DOWN. I removed all of the ads, placed only 4 in areas that I know to produce high CTR and guess what, with those 4 ads he started earning more than he ever did. More often than not, less ads means more revenue. Focus on user experience and the revenue will come. Whenever you want to change the position of your ads, please, hire a specialist, and please, focus on user experience above all, otherwise you're about to go down. #seo #growth #CTR #ads

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I published my first blog post about statically deobfuscating the Lazy Importer. Please check it out and don't forget to let me know your thoughts. Blog Link: https://lnkd.in/eW-9QV_2 .

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No human intervention allowed during deployment. Humans will eventually make mistakes. Deployments should be fully automated and should be executable, over and over again. Ideally in an incremental fashion. But also from scratch if needed in case of a disaster (mind the data). So how do you do that? First use 'infrastructure as code' to provision any shared infrastructure such as networking, security, communication or storage infrastructure. Ideally your infrastructure as code allows composition in its own right. We use Azure Bicep, which has support to load bicep modules from the azure container registry. This allows teams to maintain their own templates for e.g their subnet, while the network is still provisioned as a whole. The same goes for their storage, security and communication needs. Once the infrastructure is in place each composed host can be provisioned independently through its own deployment orchestration pipeline. Teams are free to choose the orchestration technology of their choice. Kubernetes, container apps, app services, service fabric, or whatever else they feel most comfortable with. Finally there is the data. Make a habit from automatically restoring and rebuilding your data on a regular basis Data on the inside: maintain backups and restore, as is. Data on the outside: no need to maintain backups. You should be able to rebuild this data from the original source of truth at all time. Rebuild it from scratch into a new version for every deployment containing schema changes. I personally prefer Event Sourcing for data on the inside. As the storage schema stays the same over time, it is very easy to backup and restore. While the concept of Projections allows you to rebuild the 'data on the outside' over and over again targeting new versions.

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My talk at #FrontendNation is available in full length on youtube. Let me know what you think.👇🏼 https://lnkd.in/e_GBNXTv I will post a link to an automation guide of my talk as comment. In this blog post you can also find the slides. ✅ #a11y #FrontendDevelopment #wcag #WebAccessibility

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Software / Data / Cloud Engineers are expensive. Experts in their field are expensive. Let’s find you an expert, within your budget, that will jump in today and start producing value. A few reasons to use a consultancy: - No payroll taxes - No “ramp up” time - Experts interviewed and hired by experts Schedule a call with our CEO Tyler Cowie to find the experts you need today. Checkout the link in the comments below.

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Yesterday, my colleague Subhi H. @ HighTech Innovators achieved a huge breakthrough in gathering CPU/Core information asynchronously while running software inside a Docker instance. The solution is so simple and obvious that it feels like one of those "Why didn’t we think of this earlier?" moments. I’ve been testing it rigorously, and the results are astounding. I’m now able to measure to a 20ms delta accuracy! The beauty lies in a straightforward approach: using basic Linux commands to gather the CPU stats within Docker. One example highlighting this method's incredibleness involves a basic command like "cat /proc/stat", which provides detailed real-time CPU metrics across all cores. This is no frills, no complex setup, just simple stats that tell you what’s going on under the hood, and it works like magic. In my latest Docker environment, based on ASP.NET 9.0 Docker base image, I can fetch the CPU stats at a clock tick rate of 100 Hz, meaning the system updates every 10 milliseconds. That’s just mind-blowing! The data includes everything from CPU time spent in user mode, system mode, and even idle time, spread out across each core, which provides a goldmine of information for performance monitoring. Even though some overhead is involved with reading /proc/stat, the delay is minimal, and the simplicity far outweighs any lag. I’m converting this into CNCF Prometheus-readable data, adding each delta in J/ms for precision. This will all come together in my C# project, which I’ll be demonstrating next week. What’s most exciting is the sheer elegance of the solution. We didn’t need to introduce any exotic tools or complicated mechanisms, just solid engineering. But honestly, what made this breakthrough possible was asking for help when I was stuck because until then most solutions/tools only had intervals of 1 second. Subhi jumped in with fresh eyes and a new perspective, and suddenly the solution was right there in front of us. Sometimes, when you're deep into something, you forget how helpful it is to just reach out. A quick chat with a colleague can turn everything around. This wouldn’t have happened without Subhi, and I’m so glad I asked—teamwork for the win! This simplicity is the real game-changer. Sometimes the most optimal solutions aren’t buried in layers of abstraction or fancy new libraries, but in the most straightforward methods that were there all along. Having a method that is not only simple but also so effective at such a high precision feels like striking gold. I can’t wait to share this with the wider community and showcase how something so seemingly basic can lead to such powerful results. It’s the small victories like this that fuel my passion for technology. #greenit #greensoftware #softwaredevelopment #sustainability HighTech Innovators #greenertogether

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Being in this profession for almost 28 years, I like to think I've seen the evolution that developers go through. In fact, I've experienced it firsthand and made my fair share of mistakes. I don't think terms like junior, medior, and senior make a lot of sense anymore, though. I've seen aspiring developers whose technical skills and breadth of knowledge far exceeded those of developers with 15+ years of experience. That’s why it’s so important not to judge a book by its cover. Nonetheless, experience is something to take into account when working with developers on your team.   In general, developers fresh out of school have a lot to learn. The gap between what they are trained for, and the reality of our profession is simply too big. They'll be introduced to many new techniques, so giving them overly strict guardrails isn't prudent. Even those who are self-educated need some guidance. Over time, you'll notice that they start to question those guardrails and offer suggestions that show they’re becoming more aware of the rationale behind them.   This is the point where you need to remove the guardrails to give them more room to explore and fail safely. This is also the fun period. You'll have great discussions about why certain patterns or principles make sense in particular scenarios—and when they don’t. Ironically, I've learned that developers with 15-20 years of experience are often the most dogmatic and the hardest to work with. And obviously, those with 25 years or more know exactly what they're doing, right… Or not? 🫣 #lessonslearned #consultancy #avivasolutions #carreerpath #softwareengineering

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Unveiling our product secrets at ProductTank Belgium 🤫 Many tech companies hit a wall with Scrum as they grow. Feature factories become the norm. At Mbrella, we faced this too. A few years ago, we embraced Shape Up: 🗓️ Appetites, not estimates: Prevents lingering projects 🎰 Bets, not backlogs: Focus on the product as a whole, instead of on tasks 💡 Context & direction, not specs: Empowers teams to own solutions. This shift empowered our teams and transformed our approach. Want to learn more? DM or comment for the slides! ⬇️

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We’re getting close to typing some C#! We’ve described our components in plain language and listed their dependencies in the Architecture documents. At the very end of the stream, I talked a little bit about Contracts in software development, and why they’re important. We’ll talk about that some more this afternoon. The stream is archived in the usual place, I’ll link it in the comments. See y’all at 1:00 pm eastern over on Twitch! #thatDeveloperDad #liveCoding #softwareArchitecture #cSharp #dotNet 

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