Bossy Lobster

A blog by Danny Hermes; musing on tech, mathematics, etc.

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Setting Per-Connection Timeouts with TypeORM

PostgreSQL Statement Timeout

For most applications that use a database, user-facing queries must complete in a reasonable amount of time. In order to ensure a maximum query time, PostgreSQL supports a statement_timeout which will cause a query to be cancelled if it exceeds the timeout:

$ psql
monsters_inc=> SHOW statement_timeout;
 statement_timeout …
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Fixing the Custom CA Problem in Node.js

TL;DR: Using the ca field to specify custom CAs (certificate authorities) in Node.js is a footgun. It replaces (rather than appends to) the root trust store which can lead to unintended consequences. I've seen this behavior cause outages in production when a third party server does a routine …

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The Node.js CA Footgun

Door to Nowhere

This is a story of a brief outage caused by a slightly unintuitive API1 that has some very sharp corners for the uninitiated. The outage, though brief, was of the "wake up at 4am" variety so the lesson was especially salient.

This is not a post trying to tear …

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Custom GitHub Actions

The "obvious" way to write a custom GitHub Action is using Node.js, however it's not the only way. As it turns out, a GitHub Action really just communicates with the "orchestrator" via environment variables (as inputs) and STDOUT (to produce custom outputs).

Options

When defining an action, there are …