Articles on development
Redux Minus Redux With React Contexts
When it comes to state management in the front end, Redux has long reigned supreme. With the development of Contexts, we’re now seeing the beginning of an alternative which is brand new, but also capable of being completely familiar for long-time Redux fans. Using React Contexts with Redux-like paradigms is a good way to embrace …
Greenfield Projects: Seven Ways to Set Yourself Up for Success
Greenfield projects have a hidden set of needs — and each one can be an opportunity for growth if handled well! But if handled poorly or if not handled at all, these pitfalls can perpetuate and multiply across the lifetime of the project, taking you further and further away from your treasure and further into the endless cave of despair.
A Tale of Two GitHubs: A Practical Guide
Let’s say you have two GitHub accounts: one is a work account that you use for professional projects, and the other is for your top secret hacker projects. This can cause problems like trying to push to a repository with an account that doesn’t have access or having the wrong GitHub author in your commits. …
It’s Never Been Better to Get Started with Cypress Web Tests
If your project could at all be described as a web application, your UX pipeline would likely benefit from adopting Cypress. Beating out Selenium on speed as well as breadth of testing tools, Cypress provides automated testing of your website’s critical features in a matter of minutes. A testing framework built on top of many …
How to Deploy Elixir Releases with Ansible
In my last post, I described how to generate a platform-specific Elixir release. Now, the only thing left to do is to put it on the world wide web. To follow along with this post, you’ll need a few things: An IP address for a remote machine (preferably running Linux) you want to deploy your …
Reflections in Go, for Cats
Several months ago, I had a story requiring metaprogramming in golang. I wasn’t very familiar with reflections in Go, and the available docs and write-ups aren’t the best for me, since I’m a learn-by-example kind of person. Having come to Go (ha) as a Rubyist, the lack of generics left a little bit of a …
Authorization and Authentication in GraphQL
Introduction GraphQL is growing in popularity because it allows applications to request only the data they need using a strongly-typed, self-documenting query structure that enables an API to deliver data that can evolve over time. Unlike traditional REST APIs, GraphQL exposes a single endpoint to query and mutate data. Upon learning this, one of the …
Writing ZSH Themes: A Quickref
Customizing your terminal is a fun way to streamline and personalize your digital workspace. People are more productive when using tools they enjoy and tend to value things they made themselves at a premium, but, as with all technical adventures, it can also be a little tedious to track down all the relevant documentation. This …
What Are These $%^&* Chores Doing in My Backlog!
Beyond Just Features and Bugs Projects tend to have three types of “tasks” for developers to do: features, bugs, and chores. Features and bugs are mostly self-explanatory. Features deliver direct customer value. Bugs are features that are not working as intended. These two tasks focus on direct connections to the users. Chores provide indirect customer …
Cross-Platform Elixir Releases with Docker
While releases are meant to be self-contained executables, they still call out to native system libraries to do things like open TCP sockets and write to files. That means that the native libraries referenced at compile time need to be exactly the same as the ones on your target machine. Unless you can guarantee that your workstation and cloud are exactly the same, releases can seem like only half the promise of a stress-free deployment.