Blog

Tech blog on web, security & embedded
The number of data centers worldwide is constantly increasing, and so is their electricity consumption. One way to become more power-efficient is certainly the constant development of better hardware, but we as developers should do our share. This post shows how coding in Rust can help to use existing resources more efficiently, to help preserve our planet — at least a little bit.
Asynchronous programming is pretty weird. While it is straightforward enough to understand in principle (write code that looks synchronous, but may be run concurrently yada yada yada), it is not so obvious how and when async functions actually perform work. This blog aims to shed light on how that works in Rust.
Just because we're engineers, doesn´t mean we build ALL our applications ourselves. But sometimes inspiration hits and good things happen. So our company planner is now canvas-rendered, has a Rust backend and works like a charm.
February 24, 2023

Introducing MailCrab!

MailCrab is an email test server for development, written entirely in Rust.
Not all Tweede golf projects are about deep technical challenges. Today, we’d like to talk about a project called Mindsort, to show what this fun project is about and also to give some insight into how we collaborated closely with a university research institute.

When you enabled Google Analytics (GA) on your website maybe you thought "I don't really have another viable option". Or maybe you thought "the negative effect on my visitors isn't that bad, is it?" Both are relatable, but recently Data Protection Authorities have put GA under a microscope and concluded it actually is pretty bad. Some things in GA violate the GDPR. Apart from the question of whether it is legal or not, the fact that your visitors are tracked across the internet - we feel - is just awful. And, as it turns out, you do have options.

Most of our web applications use either Node.js or Symfony for their server-side part. Both offer a lot in terms of productivity. But every now and again, when you look at the computing power used or the amount of time a simple HTTP request takes, you can't help to think "what if..?".
CI/CD (continuous integration/continous deployment) is a proces where developers integrate new code into the main branch in regular intervals (preferably several times per day). Using CI/CD allows us to get up to a quick iteration pace and gives us a way to gather feedback quickly.
July 31, 2020

Rust wide web (2/5)

Ruben has experience with a lot (and I mean a lot) of programming languages. When I asked which ones, he could name 21 off the top of his head. He loves experimenting with them, seeing what each can and can’t do. What makes a language unique? What can one language do better than the other? Why was Ruben the one to first evangelize Rust within Tweede golf? Let’s ask him!
The API documentation of cloud storage providers can be quite intimidating. If you are simply looking for a few straight forward storage actions these extensive APIs might seem a bit overkill. Another hurdle is that storage providers define their own distinctive APIs.
The point of setting up a miniservice architecture is to enable horizontal scaling, improve reusability and to speed up development by separating each domain into an independent application. Miniservices depending on a database pose a number of challenges. We'll explore a couple of them.
Tweede golf has built quite a few big web applications over the last ten years. One of our specialties being the development of Symfony applications, some of these applications have become massive, with a lot of separate functionality baked into a single monolith. For now, this situation is being contained as we've been strict about minimizing technical debt. In practice, however, it's extremely hard to completely avoid accumulation of technical debt, which is one of the reasons we have started looking into introducing microservice architectures into our projects.
September 3, 2018

Rust als webplatform?!

Wat is over 5 jaar het winnende open source webplatform? Inmiddels begint PHP - ondanks PHP7 - zijn ouderdom te tonen. Alternatieven als NodeJS zijn wel werkbaar, maar in lang niet alle scenario’s geschikt. We vertellen je graag waarom wij denken dat Rust de nieuwe speler kan worden voor high-performance applicaties op het web.
Follow up post on point light shadows in Three.js.