MobX is a simple state management solution, that can be used very easily for ReactJS. ReactJS is a render a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, but it doesn’t have a built-in state management or two way binding like Angular (In version 16.3 it has changed by introducing the new Context API).
Read MoreThis Is a tutorial that explains step by step how to write a serverless application. In this tutorial, I will use Angular and Firebase, The developer experience of the both are so painless that it is really fun. Especially if you compare it to other serverless solutions such as AWS Lambda.
Read MoreIn the end, as a developer I just want my code to run. I do not want to mess with servers, VM’s, dockers, containers, memory, CPU’s, network, load balancing, disk space... you get the point. Serverless architecture aims to do that for me. No more servers!
Read MoreNetwork caching is a great way to improve apps performance. 1. It reduces bandwidth usage. 2. It reduces CPU usage since there is less data to process. 3. It reduces redundant computations, i.e. process & render the same data multiple times.
Read MoreThe most obvious answer is to check that the code we write works the way we intended. Now this is true and a good reason to write unit tests but i think the best thing you earn from writing unit tests is preventing your code from breaking. If someone break your code he’ll know about it once the amazing unit tests you wrote fail.
Read MoreThis is the third and the last part of the mini-tutorial. It touches on the subjects of tables and media queries, and lists some of the layout best practices we use in Spectory. If you haven't read the first two parts, here are the links: part 1 and part 2.
Read MoreBefore introducing decorators I would like to say few words about AOP (Aspect-oriented Programing). What is AOP? AOP according to wikipedia AOP is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. It does so by adding additional behavior to existing code (an advice) without modifying the code itself.
Read MoreThis is part two of the mini-tutorial. It covers the negative margins, z-index and flexbox. Read part one here.
Read MoreThis is part one of the mini-tutorial. It covers the box model and introduces the concept of positioning, together with three essential CSS properties: display, float and position. Read part two here.
Read MoreThere are a lot of great benefits from unit testing .
Read MoreI realize that not a lot of actual first-time juniors will read this article. However, I'm convinced that anybody who works in a team and has to deal with people (either more experienced or less experienced) will find this text useful. So, here it goes!
Read MoreI love Rails, I think it’s the best web development platform, at least from a developer point of view (DX). But it is not perfect. One of its major disadvantages is when you try to use it with one of new modern JavaScript framework (React, Angular, Vue…). There is no “Rails” way to do it. You need to start messing with configurations and settings, all the things that Rails trying to avoid. Writing a web application in Rails traditional way would be using ActiveViews, and add a little JQuery when you need JavaScript in the client. But when You want to write a single page application (SPA), it’s just not good enough.
Read MoreTest Doubles is a generic term for any kind of pretend object used in place of a real object for testing purposes.
Read MoreAs web developers we create amazing apps. We have many tools in our arsenal - frameworks, libraries, extensions... But at the end, it all reach the same place - The browser.
Read MoreSoftware task estimation is the process of predicting the time and effort required to complete tasks. Generally, estimates are used to help customers and managers to make decisions regarding how long it will take to accomplish project. It's known that programmers often consider task estimation to be one of the most difficult things they do and consistently find themselves with inaccurate or underestimated task predictions. To handle this problem, they pad their estimates but in many cases their rough guesses are too low. Regrettably, developers think that estimation is literally the equivalent of making a weather forecast. We can't expect a forecaster to a prediction for rain a month from now but still, it's useful when making near term forecast.
Read MoreThis September is Spectory's last month with one of our projects, a startup based in the US. After close to a year of working with them, I'd like to take a moment to look back and summarize what we - the developers - have learned from it.
Read MoreAs a young parents for our little one, my wife and I are learning the "debugging life cycle" of babies.
Read More"The washing machine" is a familiar syndrome. This syndrome is about peoples' preferences while choosing the functionality of the program in their washing machine. Most people choose the same program they are used to, and it is usually the standard program. This syndrome happens in many subjects, one of them in my opinion is redux dev tools. As a SW developer and especially as a full-stack developer, one major professionality is the ability to debug the state of your application. In this article, I will try to touch not only the "30-40 degrees" program of redux dev tools, but also the other functions including the "100 degree-cotton". The adds-on of 'redux dev tools' is a great tool for interpreting and debugging the application state. I will explain about the chrome extension, but it is also available on Firefox and electron, and can be used as a remote for other browsers and non-browser environments. The review of adds-on features will be top to bottom.
Read MoreThe main promise of react & React Native is code reuse. But As Aaron Greenwald states in this wix talk, it not free. When done right you can achieve a very high code reuse percentage between your IOS, Android and Web apps.
Read MoreOne of the foundations, when talking about applications related to ecommerce, finance etc. is Consistency. Consistency is one of the transaction database properties called ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability). It means that a transaction either creates a new and valid state of data, or, if any failure occurs, returns all data to its state before the transaction was started. Sometimes we tend to think that the database takes care of concurrency issues automatically but unfortunately we are wrong… It’s true that most of the relational databases do support ACID foundations but if we don’t handle it properly in the application server side, we may encounter concurrency problems when more than one user is working on the system.
Read MoreOne of the more complicated notions presented in ES6 is generators. This is a feature with a lot of power that enhance the JavaScript language, especially in areas such as asynchronous programing.
Read MoreIn part 1 I introduced D3. in this part I will show how to dynamically update the graph with Rx.
Read MoreD3 is a javascript library for data visualization. RxJs is a reactive programing model that allows to compose asynchronous stream of data. Anyone of those library are is very powerful. Together their power twice itself and can be used to build incredible things.
Read MoreJSON Web Token is a self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object.
Read MoreRuby on rails supply a big tool set that allows rapid development right out of the box.
Read MoreJavaScript is great, but comparing to other programing languages it has many confusing parts. One of them is the use of this.
Read MoreWhat is React? React is a JS library for rendering web pages. That’s it. The closest equivalent is Angular with only directives without the other features such as services, controllers etc.
Read MoreNode JS is Asynchronous. It's a pain. It’s a pain developing this way and it’s a pain writing tests for this framework.
Read MoreAt this blog post we'll discuses one of Elixir greatest features - Supervisors & Supervision trees, the engine behind Elixir's let it crash motto.
Read MoreFifteen years ago, one database was enough to hold all the application’s data. Over the years, applications started to collect more and more data, from people, devices, events, etc. The single instance could not hold this amount of data and the throughput of usage, it needed to be scaled.
Read MoreJust like in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in our code- guests are welcome, mystery guests aren't. While we are testing our application , we need to challenge the logic and design of our code. In order to do so efficiently we will increase the power of our unitests by making it faster and by testing all parts of the code. Testing is an integral part of code writing. Unitests of Web applications need to test both the server side and the client side. The challenge of testing the server side is the decrease in performance speed due to the writing to database. As a Full Stack developer it is very important to conduct the tests in a convenient way, without compromising on quality. This is the main goal of FactoryGirl.
Read MoreMonitoring computer systems had been always important. It helped us know the system’s health, identify problems, and even to forecast them.
Read MoreBasically it’s just React but for mobile. That’s it.
Read MoreIf you want your web application to be bullet proof with no vulnerabilities at all, do not write it. There is no software that cannot be hacked, it is just a matter of resources and time, as proved many times.
Read MoreSometimes it can be very convenient to access your local development machine from the public network. Setting up something like this can be inconvenient. Your office network is usually shielded from the internet with a router and a firewall and IT managers generally disapprove opening these up for public inbound traffic. You many be able to configure your home router to forward tragic to your machine, but the process is no fun.
Read MoreJavaScript is an amazing programing language, it has beautiful parts. But it also contains very confusing and complex parts. Closures and scopes are probably two of the them. In his book JavaScript: The Good Parts (a must read for every web developer!) Douglas Crockford regrads the JavaScript Scope as one of the awfull parts. I couldn’t agree more. As a software developer that started his programming with languages such as C/C++, I had hard times getting used to it and prevent bugs and errors in my programs. But where there’s a pitfall, there is also a challenge, and one of the best way to handle this challenge is using Closures. On the contrary to scopes, Closures are one of the best features in JavaScript that adds a lot of depth and opportunities to develop clean and good code. But Closures are not easy to grasp and understand. In this blog post I will explain what is a closure, how and when to use it.
Read MoreAt the start of the first lecture at the university, the Professor introduced himself, then turned to the students: "in case anyone was confused and did not understand until now, this course deals with Calculus". Ten students found out they came to the wrong class. I felt the same unpleasant feeling that these students felt, when I discovered a few weeks ago that e-mails sent through the app got into Spam instead of "Inbox".
Read MoreRxJS is an open source JavaScript library originally created at Microsoft. RxJS is an implementation of the of the Reactive Extensions (Rx) in javascript. Rx is a reactive programming model that allows developers to easily compose asynchronous streams of data. It provides a common interface to combine and transform data from wildly different sources.
Read MoreOne of the most interesting features that will be released in Rails 5 is action cable. Action cable adds a very important capability to Rails as part of the framework which is WebSockets. In this post, I will explain the advantages of using WebSockets, when to use them and how.
Read MorePrograms are like kids. You're at your home/office playing around, see how your baby grows, does all these nice things you taught it to do, and feel so proud when it succeeds. It reflects you so well, for the better & the worst.
Read MoreWhen you are like me working in a team of web engineers, on a project which involves usage of external 3rd party libraries and you are using npm and/or bower to manage those dependencies, you probably will find it useful.
Read MoreBefore the invention of the web, if we wanted to build an application that communicates with other application, it was very complicated. We needed to read long documents such as ICD (interface control document) or other communication protocols and develop the interface layer our own. If the other application was written in other language it was even harder, sometimes the best solution was to get a library of the code and include it in our project. After the invention of the web, it was decided that there should be a better way, and we should have a standard way to perform this communication without the tight engagement. HTTP and XML was mature enough and ‘web services’ were invented.
Read MoreAngular 2 is built as "lego bricks", where every view and it's model (MVC talking) are a "component" that can define it's own onInit, onChange and onDestroy callbacks, giving it an atomic nature from one hand, and callbacks such as afterContentInit or afterViewInit which gives it a container nature from the other hand. Giving each component it's own life-cycle and giving each component the possibility to contain or be contained, makes it much easier to dynamically build an application, or a "lego castle" if you wish. Opposed to angular 1 where the controller is the major parent and it mainly contains a large html and directives.
Read MoreAsynchronous development is very important for application performance and responsiveness. An application that is written synchronously will feel stuck every time it needs to perform a long running operation such as network operations, file access, etc.
Read MoreI value performance a great deal. I believe a web application today should be as responsive as possible. The user's patience for latency is close to none. It is easier when the application renders static pages, but what should we do when the application has to present the results of complex calculations or analysis? In order to display the data fast we cannot run the calculation on demand. It just wouldn't be fast enough.
Read MoreWhen designing a web application, one of the first decisions is where and how to store the data. There are many alternatives, and the most popular ones these days are PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB. PostgreSQL and MySQL belong to the SQL camp or storing data in a structured manner that is easily queried while MongoDB belongs to the NoSQL camp that promotes storing data in a semi-structured manner that scales very well but is more difficult to query. In this blog post I will focus on PostgreSQL and on its feature of JSON support that aims to provide some of the benefits of both worlds. This post is not meant to be a SQL vs. NoSQL debate, we have plenty of those :)
Read MoreObject-Relational Mapping or ORM is a technique that connects the rich objects of an application to tables in a relational database management system. Using ORM, the properties and relationships of the objects in an application can be easily stored and retrieved from a database without writing SQL statements directly and with less overall database access code. This post goes over the excellent Ruby ORM called ActiveRecord
Read MoreDistributed systems are by nature deployed on multiple machines. In development mode though we would rather set up such an environment on a single machine for convenience. In this post we demonstrate how to set up a dynamic cluster on a single development machine.
Read MoreReact is a new(ish) front-end library from Facebook that aims to provide a simpler UI programming model with some performance gains.
Read MoreThe Angular documentation for directives can be a bit intimidating so here are a few simple guidelines to creating a reusable widget in Angular. A widget is a visual element implemented via an Angular directive and tested mostly manually in a browser. If the widget performs some calculations such as date calculations for instance that do require tests, this is best done in an injected lib that is tested separately. Examples of widgets are two-way sliders, multi-select drop-downs, graphs etc., these are visual elements that have the following interface to the outside world:
Read MoreHere are a few quick tips to optimize AngularJS code for speed:
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