How to Write Data to An Excel file in NodeJS
Excel is a really commonly used spreadsheet program that lots of companies use to transmit data. Finding a really good library that doesn’t require Excel to exist on the server can be really hard.
Using Prettier to Automatically Format JavaScript
Prettier is a code formatter that can automatically format code when save is pressed. I like using prettier to format my code because it saves me a lot of time and a lot of energy.
4 Mistakes to Avoid In Code Reviews
A code review is having someone other than the author check someone else’s code for errors or mistakes. Code Reviews are a great time to share knowledge, and learn from one another. I find that often code reviews have a lot of really common mistakes that make them a less effective.
What is Refactoring?
Martin Fowler defines refactoring as “Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behaviour of the code yet improve its internal structure.” I like to define it as “Refactoring is a systematic process of improving code without adding or taking away functionality…
What is Technical Debt?
Dealing with technical debt is one of the greatest frustrations and demotivaters to development teams. Technical debt is accumulated through out the software development lifecycle. Over time, the code becomes less and less clean which results in making changes more and more difficult.
How to do Code Reviews?
As a developer and technology manager, I like to set really high standards to ensure that code is easy to read (understandable), simple enough for the task, and commented well enough that almost anybody could understand what is going on.
Is jQuery Dead?
I don’t think jQuery is dead at this point, but it’s growth seems to be slowing.
What is a Product Manager?
A product manager is the person responsible for the creation of a particular product for a company or organization.
Automatically Compressing Images With NodeJs
Over the years, I’ve worked on a number of projects where we deal with user or company provided images which are often very large resolutions which take a long time to download on mobile phones or or poor internet connections.
This is a simple script that can be used to compress images and avoid potential costs of a service like Kraken.io
Simple Git Ignore File For NodeJS
Here’s a simple gitignore file that I start with most NodeJS projects.
6 Tips For Better Handling Traffic Spikes
As a software developer, and technology manager, I’ve had a lot of experience in the past with variable website traffic.
In the past, I’ve worked on business to consumer information websites, I’ve worked on payment gateways and even on a few ecommerce sites.
My favourite debugging techniques
I believe that debugging is one of the most important technical skills a developer can have. In the average week, I probably spend anywhere from 20 – 30 percent of my time debugging. This is because my code isn’t perfect, sometimes it does legitimately only work on my machine or device.
Joining Caddle
As a software developer, I’ve always been interested in working on things that I could potentially use and benefit from. For a long time, that’s meant that I worked on little projects for things I could use at home or for various side hustles. A few months ago, I became aware of a startup located…
What does data do?
As humans, we use data every day. Sometimes when we use data it’s completely subconscious – we don’t even realize we’re doing it. When we count the number of emails in our inbox, we can predict just how busy our day is going to be.
What is the minimum should one know to get a job as a backend developer?
Backend developers work primarily on the server side of development, typically any scripts, databases, or architecture. Code written by backend developers typically helps communicate database information to the browser or mobile app.
How to replace jQuery with Vanilla JavaScript
As a programmer, and technology manager I think it’s really important to use the right tools and technologies. There are times where I think jQuery is still really valuable but there are a lot of times where I don’t think it is valuable.
5 Best Practices for Designing RESTful APIs
Over the years, I have been really blessed to work on a number of API developments and to be able to consume a lot of APIs as well whether the APIs were in finance, sales automation (salesforce), or other services. A lot of the APIs had really noticeable deficiencies which I feel really made using the API a lot more difficult than it had to be.
This blog article is really a look at years of experience with APIs and a first attempt to at trying to make them easier to use for the developer. It’s really important to take time upfront and design a great API because it has the potential to be a huge asset for the company, and also has the potential to also be the company’s greatest liability.
A public API will have to remain virtually the same basically forever, so you really only have one chance to get it right. This is because customers or other integrators typically won’t ever update. If your API doesn’t have versioning you’ll basically never be able to make breaking changes. As users use your API and as feedback is collected you should be evolving the API.…
Book Review: JavaScript: The Good Parts
Although, JavaScript: The Good Parts is nearly ten years old I would argue it’s still a pretty good book to read. Literally, as the title implies the book calls out the best parts of the javascript language and tells what parts of the language to avoid.…
10 Tips to Become a better Node.js Developer
It’s no secret that I absolutely love JavaScript and Node.js. For those that don’t know Node.js is a framework that is built on top of JavaScript.
Node.js is an open source JavaScript runtime environment that runs on pretty much everything. It’s a great environment for building fast scalable network applications.
Node.js uses an event driven model that makes it really efficient and really good for real-time applications. Paired with serverless computing it’s fantastic for a lot of modern use cases.
In this article, I will go through the best practices for becoming a better Node.js developer. Over the last two years or so, I’ve interviewed and hired a lot of developers for the startup I’m working at.…
5 Reasons to Use AWS Lambda
In late 2014, AWS Lambda launched and has grown in widespread use since then. AWS lambda is a serverless computing technology which has been a game change for software development.
AWS Lambda is a service that makes it easy to build small scalable applications. Lambdas are small functions that are packaged up and sent to AWS. Using a framework like the serverless framework makes it fairly easy to work with and pretty efficient.
Lambda is event driven. It works by responding to events whether they be timed, API driven or responding to events within AWS. One of the most common examples of using lambda is to resize images that have been uploaded to an S3 bucket.
Lambda is stateless meaning that every time a function is triggered, it is a completely new environment.
There’s so many reasons to use AWS Lambda. It’s easy to get started with it, it’s massively flexible, it is very scalable and more. …