Richard Szolár

Serverless functions in Go

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 17:52:51 +0000

Building a Serverless Function

Maybe you’ve heard about serverless functions (or the term Function as a Service or FaaS) in the past. If not, please read on! You have nothing to lose!

You might hear this term serverless functions or cloud functions more often lately. I’ve heard about these a long time ago but I did lack a good use-case where I could leverage it fully.

Serverless functions

These are functions, that usually execute one simple task or have a single purpose. Imagine serverless functions as something where you expose an API endpoint, that if called, will run your function.

SN-EDIT v0.2 released

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 18:19:38 +0000

Initial version (v0.1)

It was more than one year ago at the beginning of 2019 when I’ve released the first version of sn-edit (v0.1).

The focus in the first version was to create a single binary app, that would allow you to use it with any editor and sync changes to the instance. This was more like a Proof of Concept.

After the intial release, as you can see this was not developed further. The initial version was very simple and worked with two tables, making that work with other settings would be not ideal and would take a lot more time. That is why I decided I would build it from scratch.

Replacing Javascript with Webassembly on Paste.me

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 21:36:53 +0000

I did create Paste.me (formerly pastedb.io) many years ago! I was always fascinated with services that you can use, to share information in a manner, that the provider can not read the contents of the shared information. From their perspective, it is simply zeroes and ones.

How does Paste.me work?

There are popular paste services, just to mention one of them, pastebin. Pastebin is quite popular amongst them, mentioned a lot in the news, mostly due to some malicious actors using it to share otherwise private information anonymously, like leaked database data, passwords or other credentials.

Did you ever hear about Go?

Wed, 27 May 2020 21:50:23 +0000

I am sure a lot of you did have the question at some point:
Which language is better?
What programming/scripting language should I use?
maybe you compared them X vs Y pros and cons

There are a lot of articles out there, that try to tackle this. I do not like to compare two languages, because they can be very different in their core. The short answer to the above question is, It depends on the use-case, skill and motivations.

Generate a PDF from HTML on Servicenow

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 19:02:40 +0000

Motivation

I am sure you know the feeling, when you want to generate a custom PDF on Servicenow. You search for a way, but the platform just simply does not offer enough. In this little how-to I would like to show you the process of creating a custom PDF while using Servicenow. We will use the very familiar and popular chrome browser for this. If I have your attention now, keep reading!

Servicenow x NodeJS Bridge Part 1

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 19:01:30 +0000

Did you ever wanted to write ES6 code or just simply use a node module while working with Servicenow? Now you can make your dreams come true!

Code Editor

On the platform, so you can write your own scripts, you mostly use the integrated code editor, which uses CodeMirror. Codemirror is quite popular amongst these web based code editors, so the choice of software is not bad, but Servicenow imposed some limitations to the editor.

Pastedb is now Paste.me

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 14:38:05 +0000

Like I have announced in late 2018. A new project was born called PasteDB. The mission was clear. Provide a way to securely share short text snippets with your friends and family, without anyone intercepting the message, not even the hosting provider.

We can now daily read in the news how big tech giants mine our data to provide a more targeted experience for their users, collect data under the pretence of providing a “better service” for their users/customers. This may be true in some cases, but we can not be sure anymore.

Servicenow Extensions

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 16:57:00 +0000

While working on new features and writing scripts for the platform, there are times where you will do the same thing repetitively. This is of course good to train your mind to remember part s of code easily, but also produces a lot of excessive lines of code which would result in less readability in the long term, produce “longer” scripts and make the whole thing harder to maintain.

We will write various snippets or code samples, sometimes extensions to core things that would make it easier to have a more-readable, more user-friendly code to work with in a longterm. Also this would provide stability of methods/features and make it easier in the future to adapt to new core changes in the servicenow releases.

Servicenow meets NodeJS

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 08:57:00 +0000

As a Software developer and user of a vast amount of Open Source projects on a daily basis, there were times, where I had to solve a problem in Servicenow and the first thing that came to my mind was “There must be a ready-made open source project ready for this kind of thing..”.

The thing is, that Servicenow uses Java Rhino for javascript execution on their platform. This is quite limited, so we are not able to use some core Java functions I would assume for security reasons. We are also not really able to run something asynchronously or run ES6 code for instance. This imposes a lot of limits in using modern packages available in the Open Source enviroment.

Wake up your Servicenow instance easily

Tue, 07 May 2019 16:36:33 +0000

Waking up your Servicenow instance can be a pain. Those of you, who are using a Servicenow Developer Platform know what I am talking about. You start your work in the morning, open your instance url just to see that your instance is hibernated and you need to wake it up first to get working.

This makes some of us nervous, takes a tremendous amount of time. You need to log in to the Servicenow Developer portal go to “Manage” then “Instances”, confirm that you want to wake up your instance etc. You can only request one developer instance at a time, so if you wan’t to have for example multiple versions of Servicenow at your disposal to test something, you need to register multiple times, this makes the process of awaking the instances even more time consuming. (The instances usually go hibernating after a few hours of inactivity)

SN-Edit

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 17:31:11 +0000

In the past few years/months, I’ve been working with the Servicenow engine. Servicenow is an interesting project, which basically revolutionized the IT Service Management world amongst others.

It has a lot of various features, you can write scripts using Javascript and using their online embedded Code Editor. For more info visit servicenow.com

The Code Editor works fine if doing simple edits, but if we would like to have something more, something which is provided by IDE’s or other desktop apps, we stumble upon the limitations of the platform.

Project: PasteDB

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 14:35:00 +0000

After seeing zerobin I was always interested in a so-called “black box” for sending short messages, pastes or code snippets without leaving any footprint on the internet.

Since zerobin was written in PHP, also I’ve found a lot of web services which were also using similar technology I decided that I would like to have something different than already exists. That is why I decided to create a Service similar to these just with some different technologies at hand. This is how PasteDB was “born”.