Scaling Open edX
Learn the principals of scaling the Open edX Learning Management System, growing from a single-server evaluation-only installation to a production always-up instance with thousands of concurrent users.
January 2021
Scaling MongoDB for Open edX
Learn how to scale your Open edX platform by migrating the MongoDB database service to its own remote Ubuntu server running on AWS EC2.
Scaling MySQL for Open edX
Learn how to scale your Open edX platform by migrating the MySQL database service to its own remote Ubuntu server running on AWS EC2.
Open edX Configuration Management Tutorial
Learn how to manage your Open edX configuration from VS Code on your desktop computer, using a Github repository as your archive and deployment platform.
Open edX Configuration Tutorial
Learn pro tips on how to configure the Open edX platform. This tutorial will help you to better understand the organizational strategy behind the many Open edx platform configuration files. You’ll also learn about the platform architecture and how the file system is organized.
Open edX Step-By-Step Production Installation Guide
Get your first Open edX platform up and running with this detailed step-by-step how-to guide that provides detailed instructions on how to build your AWS EC2 Ubuntu Linux server, execute the Open edX native build scripts, and configure your new platform.
Open edX Complete Backup Solution
Learn how to create a complete backup solution for your Open edX installation. This detailed step-by-step how-to guide covers backing up MySQL and MongoDB, organizing backup data into a single date-stamped tarball zip file, plus how to setup a cron job and how to copy your backups to an AWS
June 2020
Animations in ReactJS
Sophisticated animations pose some interesting challenges in ReactJS, especially when using CSS keyframes. I recently created a cool CSS/JS animation for a ReactJS project, and it turned out to be harder than I’d anticipated. Hopefully this article will help you to avoid, or at least anticipate some of the challenges
January 2020
LetsEncrypt On Amazon Linux2 + Apache
Get your Letsencrypt SSL certificate working on your AWS EC2 Amazon Linux2 Apache instance in just a few minutes with this detailed step-by-step how-to guide.
December 2019
Comprehensive Django Setup Guide: Part I
Learn how to create a production-ready Django web platform using cookiecutter-django, deployed to AWS Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx, Gunicorn, Redis and MySQL. I’ve refined the following “best practice” comprehensive setup procedure to ensure that I get each project setup consistently, the right way, the first time.