Build, Run, Repeat - page 4
-
Easier Isn't Always Better
Like many other desk workers around the world, I now perform my work from home. After however many months of social distancing the office seems like a distant memory, and the vast majority of my interaction with my colleagues is online. At the heart of this for me is the group chatting and collaboration tool Microsoft Teams, which I’ve now been using for some time - even before the pandemic. There are a lot of these tools out there and they all have slight differences, but a recent change in the Teams UI caught my attention. Teams has a concept of… well, Teams (the naming isn’t the greatest), essentially groups of people within an organisation. You can then form “channels” within that team, and within the channel you can start a “conversation” - a starting post, that other users then directly reply to. Until recently, creating a new conversation was done the same way as sending a chat message - type it out and hit enter. However there is now a button with the words “New Conversation”, that you must click to reveal the interface for starting a new conversation. At first glance this seems like an unnecessary extra step, especially given it’s been deliberately added - but there is more to this than meets the eye.
-
Progress Not Perfection
One of the common sayings in the fitness community is “progress, not perfection”. This is the idea that you’ll never do something perfectly, especially not on the first try - but that unless you attempt to do it, you’ll never get any better. I think the same mindset is important to hold when working as a software developer. I’ve found both developers and designers (myself included) can be prone to hesitating on delivering work. Hitting that “release” button or dropboxing that print-ready file to the printer. This week I’m going to share some hints on how to worry less about getting started.
-
In Defense of Angular
It would probably be hard to argue that React hasn’t very much won the frontend javascript framework war. Even a cursory look at the stats on GitHub, React is both vastly more popular and remains loved despite it’s heavy use. I’ve even fooled around with React myself, despite most of my experience and development on the frontend being in Angular. So why should you care about Angular in 2020?
-
It's a Kind of Magic: Infrastructure as Code
This week has been a pretty relaxed one, as I’m transitioning between two jobs. I’ve tried to keep a habit of my working hours however, just to keep consistency. This has meant tinkering with a lot of new things! I’ve been diving into the world of React and Azure Functions, I’ve even had a bit of a play with Monogame! But I think the most exciting lesson for me came from doing my first bit of infrastructure as code in Azure. Nothing fancy, in fact incredibly simple, and this isn’t going to be a guide on the how. Instead I wanted to touch on why you should be considering the approach as an extension of your development, rather than just something you do at the end to host/run your code.
-
Master of the Domain
Domain is one of those words I almost never heard before becoming a software developer, and now I hear it pretty much every day. The traditional definition comes from defining an area based on who rules it - and it’s why it came to be associated with domain names. But in software development, it’s typically used as a shorthand for a particular area of knowledge - the classic “Jordan has good domain knowledge on this, we’ll bring them into it”. What I’ve found is there can be confusion on what exactly domain knowledge means. Some strongly associate it with the technical aspects, others the business and it’s requirements. Neither of these viewpoints are wrong, but in all things, confusion and misunderstanding will bring unnecessary pain.
subscribe via RSS