Consul Clustering: Our Experience

Introduction Consul is a distributed key-value store, heavily opinionated towards service discovery. If you’re not familiar with the basics of service discovery, Gabriel Schenker, who we’ve had the pleasure of working with, has an excellent introduction to service discovery. In this blog post, we will cover how we set up and expanded our Consul cluster…. Read More

Connectivity between Nginx and Consul-Template

Overview In the past couple of weeks, I have been wrestling with the connectivity between Nginx and Consul-Template.  While it’s fairly straightforward to get Consul-Template to control Nginx, having them work well within Docker isn’t the easiest thing in the world.  But that is jumping quite a bit forward, let’s start with the problem before… Read More

April Fools – Developer Style

Here at uShip we are pretty big fans of open sourcing code. At the same time, we are also fans of a good ol’ prank. Hence, we have decided to open source a few of our favorite code pranks to share with the world (and just in time for April Fool’s Day). But first, a… Read More

JavaScript for C# Developers

Overheard at work today: “…this is why I hate JavaScript so much.” Sound like something you’d say? Instead of letting the hate flow through you, know that it doesn’t have to be like that. JavaScript is evolving quickly and picking up luxuries that C# has had for years. Subtle Differences Before I get into the… Read More

What Nerds Rock Means To Us

uShip World Headquarters is located two blocks away from the Austin Convention Center. Some days we look out the window and see groups of educators, boat dealers, or people from various conferences taking place at the Convention Center strolling around the Austin streets. But no week is more packed with people than the annual South by… Read More

Does your REST API need an SDK?

Introduction When integrating with a platform that offers a REST API, a developer sometimes has the option of downloading the client library in their language of choice, or writing HTTP code themselves to integrate with the API directly. You as an API provider should decide early on if you wish to offer SDKs to your… Read More

Populating UITableViewCells Asynchronously to Fix UITableView Lag

Note: This article was originally published on Github Abstract In general, the key to keeping the iPhone UI responsive is to avoid blocking the main thread. In the case of UITableView, this boils down to keeping tableView(_:cellForRowAtIndexPath:) as performant as possible. However, sometimes it is simply not possible to marshall all of the data needed… Read More

6 Major Lessons from uShip Hackathons

Over the past three years, hackathons at uShip have grown from an idea to a tradition. Ideally, we want each event to feel almost effortless in their planning and execution. While we’ve experienced many successes, we’ve also learned a lot of lessons along the way. Below are some of the takeaways from our team of… Read More