Decent News for June

Everybody Gets Their Own Key

Fred Brooks said in the Mythical Man-Month, "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

I don't think it's been quite that bad of a ratio for me this last month. But it did take a chunky amount of time to rewrite the deployment scripts I'd made for myself so that other developers could use them to deploy to Decent Portal.

We've got a website at https://decentapps.net that serves purely static content from a global CDN network (BunnyCDN, if you're wondering). This architecture is super-fast and scalable - perfect for Decent Apps.

My deployment scripts were using a single API key from Bunny to upload app files from Github to web hosting storage. I couldn't generate different API keys with different permissions to give to Decent developers - there was just the one, all-powerful God Key. Distributing a single API key like this to all developers would be a security nightmare. And everything about Decent Apps must be very secure - that's our charter.

So I wrote a service that sits in front of web hosting storage and proxies the upload requests with per-developer authorization. Each dev gets their own key that is provisioned with access to only their apps. And they get deploy/promote/rollback actions, which in my opinion, are necessary for professional web app development. This all took about a month. I'm a little proud of it.

We've also got nice documentation. I really want the onboarding experience for new Decent App developers to be as smooth as it can be.

Becoming An Organization

I felt it was time to move the constellation of Decent-related open source repos out of my personal Github account and into an organization account. This puts the repos in one tidy place, with an overview page, at https://github.com/DecentAppsNet.

-Erik Hermansen
Founder, Decent Apps