Programming and stuff
I went through a major role change in my professional life recently. I switched from a Front-end Architect position back to a Software Engineer one. When observed from a prism of a corporate career ladder it seems to be a demotion. Yet, somehow, it doesn’t feel this way.
What I see a lot is a popup asking me to allow notification for a website. If the popup attacks me right after I just opened the page, I have no interest in enabling them without knowing what I actually can expect and intuitively click ‘No’. That way I’ve never received a notification from a website. Are they inevitably bad and should be avoided at any cost? I decided to check it out.
When I started using Typescript instead of plain Javascript I felt like it slowed me down and killed the joy of programming. I’m not talking about the learning curve, it’s about the kind of code I was writing.
It’s been a while since my last post. I was about to write a summary of the things that happened to me in 2018, but January was too eager to end. We have August now, but who cares.
To me, it is quite clear how to be productive as a software developer. I need a plan of what to do, I need to prevent any distractions, use focused time to solve the problem and implement the solution. This is my take on the opposite perspective: How to benefit from not being productive.
I used to use a self-hosted Ghost blogging platform the last two years. I managed to ship it with my own theme and a few applications, even though they were experimental. The version 0.11 is abandoned now as its LTS support expired on 20th of March 2017. I also had a lot of problems with updating to the 1.0 branch, so I decided to move on to Hexo - a static page generator.
Here is my subjective list of things you can do to improve that process.
We have a draggable item and a link inside. When a user grabs a link and tries to move it, browsers like Chrome or Firefox provide a default behavior. Thanks to that you can for example move a link to the Bookmarks bar. In our case, it’s something we would rather like to avoid.
As mentioned in the structure, a test case goes red when anything in the it block throws an exception. First of all, by calling a function in specs we expect that it has been executed without any error. If the code seems to be pretty simple and writing specs for it sounds like a waste of time, it’s still worth to have them, at least for this information.
As I said in the introduction you can select one of the various available interfaces. My favourite is BDD and this is the interface I’m going to present here. The main goal of this interface is to help you write specs as grammatically correct sentences.
My intention is to create a practical guide to writing specs. More important than knowing how is knowing why to write specs.
As I wrote in the I do not write tests article, my favourite testing stack is Mocha with Sinon and Chai. Why? Each of the libraries is focused on a specific problem, they are highly customizable and their big community provides many add-ons and integrations. This makes them a truly universal stack.
Last Thursday during a press conference the head of the Intergalactic Department of the <abbr title="Internation Organization of Cosmos">IOC</abbr> presented a project of a new spacecraft, which will allow us to visit distant parts of the Universe, explore The Unknown and bring a lot of The Something to the Earth to sell it for double the price.
I had a pleasure to work with a very dynamic team. Not only our cooperation with clients was changing, but our tooling and coding environment as well. It was a great opportunity to make experiments, so we used it regularly.
I’ve spent plenty years on coding, invested a lot of time in developing products, wrote thousands of lines of code and all that without writing a single unit test. I felt skilful, productive and effective at my job. Of course I made many mistakes, but as long as they were easy to fix I treated them as a side effect of my work.
I am totally frontend guy and used to work on web frontends. Last weeks were time of dev experiment for my team. For me? The buzzer in my Challenge Detector is going to be quite tired soon.
the game called Replace Assumption. It’s my favourite game and is the best when your opponent doesn’t know she/he is part of the game. You are warned, so we do not score this one. We can treat it as introduction. So fun starts with question. Who would win: Superman or Batman?
Ghost is a blogging platform and a lightweight alternative to the Wordpress. It’s written in NodeJS (which we all love), has a markdown-based editor, a very simple admin interface and yet is highly customizable. This make Ghost my platform of choice.
With javascript it’s quite common to experience uncommon things. Sometimes it’s about wrong parameters, something is undefined or we write totally invalid code using valid syntax. Moreover asynchronous code gives us headache when nesting goes beyond two or three levels.