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Scaling your API with rate limiters

The following are examples of the four types rate limiters discussed in the accompanying blog post. In the examples below I've used pseudocode-like Ruby, so if you're unfamiliar with Ruby you should be able to easily translate this approach to other languages. Complete examples in Ruby are also provided later in this gist.

In most cases you'll want all these examples to be classes, but I've used simple functions here to keep the code samples brief.

Request rate limiter

This uses a basic token bucket algorithm and relies on the fact that Redis scripts execute atomically. No other operations can run between fetching the count and writing the new count.

FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.


Effective Engineer - Notes

What's an Effective Engineer?

@danielgtaylor
danielgtaylor / gist:0b60c2ed1f069f118562
Last active April 2, 2024 20:18
Moving to ES6 from CoffeeScript

Moving to ES6 from CoffeeScript

I fell in love with CoffeeScript a couple of years ago. Javascript has always seemed something of an interesting curiosity to me and I was happy to see the meteoric rise of Node.js, but coming from a background of Python I really preferred a cleaner syntax.

In any fast moving community it is inevitable that things will change, and so today we see a big shift toward ES6, the new version of Javascript. It incorporates a handful of the nicer features from CoffeeScript and is usable today through tools like Babel. Here are some of my thoughts and issues on moving away from CoffeeScript in favor of ES6.

While reading I suggest keeping open a tab to Babel's learning ES6 page. The examples there are great.

Punctuation

Holy punctuation, Batman! Say goodbye to your whitespace and hello to parenthesis, curly braces, and semicolons again. Even with the advanced ES6 syntax you'll find yourself writing a lot more punctuatio

@chantastic
chantastic / on-jsx.markdown
Last active March 20, 2024 01:03
JSX, a year in

Hi Nicholas,

I saw you tweet about JSX yesterday. It seemed like the discussion devolved pretty quickly but I wanted to share our experience over the last year. I understand your concerns. I've made similar remarks about JSX. When we started using it Planning Center, I led the charge to write React without it. I don't imagine I'd have much to say that you haven't considered but, if it's helpful, here's a pattern that changed my opinion:

The idea that "React is the V in MVC" is disingenuous. It's a good pitch but, for many of us, it feels like in invitation to repeat our history of coupled views. In practice, React is the V and the C. Dan Abramov describes the division as Smart and Dumb Components. At our office, we call them stateless and container components (view-controllers if we're Flux). The idea is pretty simple: components can't

@nolanlawson
nolanlawson / promises_answer_sheet.md
Last active July 26, 2022 08:02
Promises puzzle cheat sheet
@jashkenas
jashkenas / semantic-pedantic.md
Last active November 29, 2023 14:49
Why Semantic Versioning Isn't

Spurred by recent events (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244700), this is a quick set of jotted-down thoughts about the state of "Semantic" Versioning, and why we should be fighting the good fight against it.

For a long time in the history of software, version numbers indicated the relative progress and change in a given piece of software. A major release (1.x.x) was major, a minor release (x.1.x) was minor, and a patch release was just a small patch. You could evaluate a given piece of software by name + version, and get a feeling for how far away version 2.0.1 was from version 2.8.0.

But Semantic Versioning (henceforth, SemVer), as specified at http://semver.org/, changes this to prioritize a mechanistic understanding of a codebase over a human one. Any "breaking" change to the software must be accompanied with a new major version number. It's alright for robots, but bad for us.

SemVer tries to compress a huge amount of information — the nature of the change, the percentage of users that wil

@staltz
staltz / introrx.md
Last active May 2, 2024 12:31
The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing
@mziwisky
mziwisky / Oauth2.md
Last active February 15, 2024 23:31
Oauth2 Explanation

OAUTH2

The Problem

I’m a web app that wants to allow other web apps access to my users’ information, but I want to ensure that the user says it’s ok.

The Solution

I can’t trust the other web apps, so I must interact with my users directly. I’ll let them know that the other app is trying to get their info, and ask whether they want to grant that permission. Oauth defines a way to initiate that permission verification from the other app’s site so that the user experience is smooth. If the user grants permission, I issue an AuthToken to the other app which it can use to make requests for that user's info.

Note on encryption

Oauth2 has nothing to do with encryption -- it relies upon SSL to keep things (like the client app’s shared_secret) secure.

function map (arr, func) {
return Promise.resolve().then(function () {
return arr.map(function (el) { return func(el) })
}).all()
}
function mapSeries (arr, func) {
let currentPromise = Promise.resolve()
let promises = arr.map(function (el) {
return currentPromise = currentPromise.then(function () {
@avi-flombaum
avi-flombaum / list.rb
Created July 9, 2013 17:57
A form writer to model pattern I use in Rails a lot.
class List < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accessible :name, :items_to_add
has_many :items
# Allows me to easily build forms that do
# complex things but still plug into
# mass-assignment.
def items_to_add=(items)
items.each{|i| add_item(i)}