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Making a dent in the tech universe

Making a dent in the tech universe


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Sustainability in IT business. What you can do to decarbonise

Most of us are onboard with the fact that humans have been overconsuming the earth's resources at an unsustainable rate. Action from a global, government, and local government level is still unsatisfactory. Everyone needs to start doing their bit, and hopefully each little bit adds up and makes a big difference.

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    Devs for Ukraine Conference

    ARTICLE

    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.

    What App Should You Develop?

    ARTICLE

    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.

    Choosing a Headless CMS

    ARTICLE

    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.

    Working on Pull Requests

    RESOURCE

    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).

    Business transformation

    ARTICLE

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

    What does it mean to go serverless?

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Architecture overview

    Integrating third-party provider: Kratos

    RESOURCE

    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.

    *Refactor code one change at a time with [retest](https://github.com/AlexB52/retest).*

    Pragmatic Refactoring

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Photo by [Elif Dilara Bora](https://unsplash.com/@elifborae?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/venice-carnival?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

    Testing ActiveRecord Concerns

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Photo by [Dmitry Ratushny](https://unsplash.com/@ratushny?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/hope?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

    An alternative to service objects

    RESOURCE

    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:

    Rails best practice security exceptions

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Tracking hours

    ARTICLE

    We needed a time tracker but we didn’t want to build one. Why reinvent the wheel? We found MinuteDock and we’ve been using it since 2010.

    Necessity > invention

    ARTICLE

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

    Devs for Ukraine Conference

    ARTICLE

    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.

    What App Should You Develop?

    ARTICLE

    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.

    Choosing a Headless CMS

    ARTICLE

    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.

    Working on Pull Requests

    RESOURCE

    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).

    Business transformation

    ARTICLE

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

    What does it mean to go serverless?

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Architecture overview

    Integrating third-party provider: Kratos

    RESOURCE

    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.

    *Refactor code one change at a time with [retest](https://github.com/AlexB52/retest).*

    Pragmatic Refactoring

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Photo by [Elif Dilara Bora](https://unsplash.com/@elifborae?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/venice-carnival?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

    Testing ActiveRecord Concerns

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Photo by [Dmitry Ratushny](https://unsplash.com/@ratushny?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/s/photos/hope?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)

    An alternative to service objects

    RESOURCE

    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:

    Rails best practice security exceptions

    RESOURCE

    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.

    Tracking hours

    ARTICLE

    We needed a time tracker but we didn’t want to build one. Why reinvent the wheel? We found MinuteDock and we’ve been using it since 2010.

    Necessity > invention

    ARTICLE

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

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