I am writing a book: Cloud Native Web Development

On February 28, 2020 I decided to write a book - that was 10 weeks ago. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, I did not have many opportunities to leave home and spent a good amount of my spare time writing a book and all the source code that comes with it.

One week from today, on May 17, 2020, I am going to start pre-orders with the first 100 copies at a 50% discount! If you would like to get notified, please follow me on X (@mootoday).

Why write a book?

I have developed, tested, deployed and maintained many web applications. With every line of code written, every reported bug fixed and every production outage resolved, I learned something new. I like to share what I have learned, make sure others can fast-track their projects and use my experience as a starting point for their own businesses.

The internet provides in-depth expert advice on pretty much any topic, but you need to know what to look for. The reason I write this book is because I see a lack of comprehensive end-to-end guides on how to develop a web application from scratch. From the initial git init to production support and anything in between.

What is the book about?

Web applications once were static HTML with CSS and a backend that processed form submissions. Fast forward to today and web development is more complex than it has ever been. With new frameworks, technologies & reusable code packages appearing (what feels like) weekly, where do you begin?

In this book, we will walk through the end-to-end process of developing a cloud-native web application. You will learn technologies, processes, tips & tricks and gain hands-on experience. You will find out about mistakes made (so you can avoid them) by the author based on his two decades of experience in developing web applications.

Links to additional resources such as videos, blog posts and articles are provided where necessary to give you an opportunity to dive deeper into topics of interest. These are resources I found useful and wish I had found earlier.

The book starts with introductions to technologies used throughout the book and explains what alternatives are available.

The second part is hands-on, with pull requests that correspond to individual chapters in the book. All readers are part of a community and can collaborate among themselves and with the author.

We will start with a basic boilerplate, configure a CI / CD pipeline to test and deploy the web application and add feature toggles to ensure frequent deployments to production are fearless. For visibility, we will set up production monitoring & alerts and discuss how to perform rollbacks should that become necessary.

A big part is going to be how to test the web application. Component tests and end-to-end tests to make sure new features don’t introduce regression bugs. To have the most impact, tests are going to be part of the continuous integration pipeline and deployments will not happen if a test fails.

We will configure Tailwind CSS to style the pages and components and wrap up the second part by learning about user authentication and how to interact with a database to persist and load data.

Five evenings and two days to go

There is still some work to be done between now and Sunday! Complete and extend certain chapters, process the reviewer feedback, design a cover page (anyone wants to help?), read the book a few more times to make sure it reads smoothly and each step makes sense given its context.

Table of contents

I’m leaving you with the entire table of contents as it stands at the time of this writing. If you have any feedback at all, please do let me know! (Apologies for the formatting…)

About this book

The author

Why write a book?

What is this book not?

What does this book cover?

Part 1: Technologies, Tools & Processes

Part 2: Develop a foundation

Audience

Source code

Stay Informed

Part 1: Technologies, Tools & Processes

Topics you will learn

What is cloud-native?

Guiding Principles

1. User experience

User interface

Performance

Mobile

2. Team Productivity

3. Automation

Scripts

Tests

CI / CD

Development Environment

gitpod.io

GitHub

Why?

Alternatives

Frontend

Svelte

Why?

Alternatives

Tailwind CSS

Why?

Alternatives

Firebase SDK

Why?

Alternatives

Backend

Sapper

Why?

Alternatives

Google Cloud Platform

Alternatives

Database

Cloud Firestore

Why?

Alternatives

CI / CD

GitHub Actions

Why?

Alternatives

Testing

Cypress

Why?

Alternatives

Testing Library

Why?

Alternatives

Monorepo

Why?

Alternatives

Part 2: Develop a foundation

Introduction

A monorepo template to start with

Monorepo directory structure

Create a new Github project

Summary

Add the Sapper template

Clone the repository

Create a new branch

Add the web service

Create a pull request

Summary

Hosting on Firebase

Create a Firebase project

Set a resource location

Register your app with Firebase

Add the Firebase SDK to the web application

Install the Firebase CLI

Log in to Firebase

Initialize Firebase CLI

Deploy to Firebase Hosting

Deploy the web application

Server-side rendered web application vs static site generators

Manually deploy the Sapper web application

Summary

Set up the continuous deployment pipeline

Why now? We haven’t developed anything yet

GitHub Actions

Set up GitHub Actions

Create a FIREBASE_TOKEN secret

Create an encrypted secret on GitHub

Test the new workflow

Enable workflow optimization

Summary

Local Development

Summary

Feature Toggles

What are feature toggles?

Feature toggles to release unfinished code

Firebase Remote Config

Initialize Remote Config

Set up our first feature toggle

Svelte stores

A feature toggle store

Configure feature toggles

Manage groups in Remote Config

Summary

Production monitoring

Create an uptime check

Create an alert policy

Summary

Rollbacks

Fix Forward

Summary

Testing

End-to-end tests

Write new end-to-end tests

Organize your tests

Run tests in headless mode

Summary

Component tests

Configure Cypress Svelte component tests

Write a Svelte component test

Run Cypress component tests

Summary

Use Testing Library

Summary

Generate product videos

Cypress Dashboard

Configure Cypress to record tests

Record the first successful test

Record the first failed test

Summary

Enable tests in the continuous integration pipeline

Validate the CI pipeline

Summary

Enable pull request integration

Commit a failed test

Summary

Tailwind CSS

Initialize & configure

Create a Tailwind CSS component

Use Tailwind CSS in Svelte components

Use Svelte components to abstract utility classes

Summary

Database

User authentication

Connect a custom domain

Summary

What’s next?

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