On the early mornings of 26th and 27th April (4am NZ time) members of the developer teams from Abletech and Addressfinder attended the [Devs For Ukraine](https://www.devsforukraine.io/) Conference, a free, online engineering conference with the goal to raise funds and provide support to Ukraine.

The following post will explain how you can build a simple party management and team service complete with relationship graph, access control and permissions in less than a day. We’ll be using a tool called Hasura with data stored in a Postgres database.

Navigating the choices for building front ends can be daunting. Like everything technology based, you are faced with a bunch of technology choices and tradeoffs. This article attempts to distill your app development options and outline the various pros and cons.

Content Management Systems seem to be a hot topic at the moment. We have been building varying solutions for several clients with integrated CMS systems, including our very own websites abletech.nz and addressfinder.nz. Our personal experience sees us on a three to five year lifecycle with CMS’s. Abletech went from WordPress, to BlogSpot, to Tumblr, to Medium, and now to Strapi over the course of 16 years! This article outlines some of our learnings, why we keep changing, and what we are really after from our CMS.

JAMstack with Next.js, Netlify and Prismic CMS

JAMstack with Next.js, Netlify and Prismic CMS

JAMstack with Next.js, Netlify and Prismic CMS

When agencies in New Zealand’s public sector need the services that Abletech provides, they simply visit Pae Hokohoko | Marketplace to find us.

Custom software is designed for a specific purpose, user or organisation. Read about our Abletech SaaS (Software as a Service) product AddressFinder.

Similar to how we write sentences, there are a lot of ways to write code and produce the same outcome. Because each developer has their own coding style, ensuring the code quality is necessary before integrating it into the code repository. Code reviews provide a means to ensure that the quality of the code meets the standard of the team and identify any potential defects or improvements. Developers integrate this into a process called pull request (PR).

Loyalty NZ chose Abletech as a key partner to transform their business and build their software capability.

It’s time to look closely at serverless development. Come on a journey to investigate the serverless development model with Typescript. This article will take you through a potential framework, ORM, relational database provider, how to test, and our conclusions.

Looking to turn your push dataflow into a pull Broadway pipeline? Here’s an introduction.

Retest promise

Building applications is hard, and developers need to maximise productivity, so they can focus their efforts on solving business problems. One way of achieving this is to use services provided by third-party providers. Read on for David Oram’s process of integrating Kratos in Go.

Last year, I read the amazing *99 Bottles of OOP* by Sandi Metz, Katrina Owen & TJ Stankus. The book explores OOP concepts and how to refactor code while being one cmd + z away from green tests. It teaches “practical techniques for getting things done that lead, naturally and inevitably, to beautiful code”, by changing one line at a time.

How secure are your apps? Spoiler — not very.

ActiveRecord classes manage persistence and have a tight relationship with their database tables. This relationship, sometimes, makes testing tricky and even trickier when testing Rails concerns. This article describes how to test a concern in isolation from its ActiveRecord class and its associated database table.

Service objects are overused. They have become the default solution for any new features in a Rails codebase. They’re also hard to talk about as they mean different things for different people. Here is how I define them:

However, these security features can adversely affect real users and you may notice ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken exceptions appearing in your production runtime which can be challenging to reproduce.

Image by Ralf Kunze from Pixabay

TL;DR: here’s the project on Github.

During covid lockdown we maintained business as usual, working from home. Life went on but we missed our team tradition of gift giving.

Our dev team recently sat down to share our favourite tips, tricks and tools. This resulted in great conversations and everyone went away with more tools, and productivity or workflow tips & tricks, on their tool-belt. We would like to share these here so you can benefit too.