User Experience, or UX, is a term that gets used (and a little abused) quite a bit. But what does it actually mean?

To understand how agile came to be popular in our industry it helps to understand what came before. When software came out of University Computer Laboratories and people with Computer Science degrees were working in companies using computers to build business applications, the industry looked to existing industries for inspiration of how to structure their work. The industry they chose was engineering. A number of principals were adopted from Engineering and applied to software projects.

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).

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.

Design and development are sometimes thought of as two very opposite disciplines — one is creative and one is logical. Developers can get stuck in this trap, avoiding design because they ‘aren’t creative’ and getting paralysed when they inevitably have to make a minor design decision.

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

The source code for this guide is available on Github and you can view the original article on my blog (built with this starter).

TL;DR: here’s the project on Github.

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.

Find out more about Elixir by sitting in on this Abletech tech talk from Nigel and David at Abletech.

The minimum set of files we want to sync is the actual source code that is committed into git. Look at your .gitignore for hints on what to remove in your project. For our Elixir service we have dependencies, and build artifacts, that are written to disk, so moving deps and _build folders external to the shared project folder should speed things up.

If you want to put the custom map you’ve created with MyMaps onto a website you have two options:

Nigel Ramsay shows how to see if Google are indexing your pages, or dropping them from the Google Search index. And what to do about it.

Postman is a great API testing tool. It has a boat-load of functionality that I will never use, but at the heart of it, it does these things:

Our Rapid Projects team developed this mobile app in three months. We used React Native and found it fast and efficient. Watch a demo of SmartInspect. Hear what Naiki Pearl and Kate Norquay found as they developed using React Native.

Kate’s favourite talks include Julie Grundy on accessibility, Theresa Ma on improving the way designers and engineers work together, and Diana Mounter from GitHub on the interaction of colour systems.

Here is a step by step guide on how to configure Visual Studio Code to automatically format your Elixir code using the new built-in formatter included in version 1.6.