Category: Programming

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

Why I love VSCode

I’ve been programming for a long time, and I’ve tried a lot of editors over that time. As a developer, I believe that my editor is the most important tool I have. At least half of what I do is done in my editor, a really terrible editor can even lead to injuries. Having a bad editor that isn’t working with my workflow leads to a lot of stress and wasted time. I was happy with Visual Studio for the most part, it could do everything I needed as long as I stayed on the microsoft stack. I find VS Code to be different, very different. Continue reading →

What is ORM?

Most software projects need to talk to a database at some point – they usually do GET queries for data, update a field or create a record. In the past, people would write raw code that communicated with the database and built an object or some code representation of the data that they would manipulate. This lead to an incredible amount of duplicated code for every project that usually had some subtle bug that was present in all libraries. Continue reading →

5 Tips for Finding Amazing React Components

One of the most important parts of building scaleable systems quickly is to find work that others have done and use it as part of our system. Using packages others built and assembling it with your business rules and logic is a lot like putting together pieces of Lego but following your instructions.

One of my favourite parts of React is that there’s usually hundreds of small open source components that can be used and usually easily modified to suit my needs. For example, there’s dozens of really well done date/time pickers that usually require no effort to put into place. Continue reading →

What are Design Patterns

Design patterns have been around for a long time in software development. Design patterns are basically a standard approach to solving a problem that can be found constantly in software development. Patterns are typically used for creating reusable designs, and defining the interactions between different objects or subsystems. I like to think of design patterns as a structured approach to software development and a very good way of improving communication between software developers. Continue reading →

5 Reasons to Use Node.js on Your Next Project

JavaScript has forever changed the way that websites are built. Even in it’s early days, it was being used to validate forms before data was submitted to servers. In the last 5 to 10 years, we no longer needed to do full page refreshes because of JavaScript which made the web feel faster and more responsive. Continue reading →

How to Debug Vertical/Horizontal Scrollbars

When building websites, it can be really challenging to debug what’s causing unexpected scrollbars.

In this post, I provide a very good solution for debugging scrollbars. Continue reading →

5 Tips To Write More Maintainable Code

Writing maintainable code can be challenging especially to newer developers, because they won’t have experience with coming back to code later or having to review somebody else’s changes. In this blog post, I provide 5 Tips on How to Write More Maintainable Code. Continue reading →

Best Practices for Writing Tests

When I say the word test, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? It’s probably the boring tests that you did in school that were either multiple choice or required sentences or in math showing your work. When I talk about tests it’s usually an automated process which can execute on software and help improve the quality and act as part of the quality assurance process.

There’s a bunch of different ways of doing tests such as automated testing, manual testing, smoke tests, and then various different subtypes such as unit testing or regression testing. Continue reading →

How to force VSCode to Open Files in a New Tab

Visual Studio Code is a fantastic open source editor from Microsoft. By default, in Visual Studio Code, files open in the same tab. Continue reading →

How to Use CRM To Grow Your Business

Implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is vital to growing a company’s business because having a relationship with customers is vital. In this post, I will detail how to use crm to grow your business by implementing it correctly, making sure staff are using it and providing a few really good tips to automate business processes which will help reduce costs and drive revenue. Continue reading →

5 Strategies to get Around SOQL Query Limits

In Apex, there’s quite a few constraints that are strictly enforced because the platform is a shared multitenant environment. Quite a few of the limits result in runtime exceptions that can’t be handled.

For those familiar with Salesforce, it’s no secret that there’s a lot of limits. For example, there’s limits around the ViewState which were pretty painful to work around.

One of the first limits, I believe all new Salesforce developers hit is the limit for a maximum of SOQL queries that can be done. Continue reading →

Awesome Resources for Learning Salesforce Lightning

At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce announced they were changing the Salesforce User Interface to make it simpler to use. The new User Interface is called Salesforce Lightning. In my blog post, What is Salesforce Lightning I cover a lot more about what it is and how development differs from using Apex and Visualforce.

If you don’t have any experience with JavaScript, it will make programming Salesforce Lightning a lot more difficult. I strong recommend having a look at my blog post Resources for Learning JavaScript before you dive into learning Salesforce Lightning because JavaScript is what’s used predominantly in the controller now.

In the last two years or so, there’s been a steady increase in the number of resources that have become available for learning lightning. I launched my first lightning component as part of an AppExchange product about a year ago and have been doing lots of lightning, react and node development since then. I believe that all Salesforce Developers will need to learn and master javascript to avoid becoming irrelevant and unemployable in the next couple of years. Continue reading →

How Code Becomes Legacy Code

I like to think that a legacy system is code that’s being used in production and still works fine, but is using older designs or older techniques that are no longer in common use. Legacy isn’t a label that means something is broken or retired, it means the software still works but might not be modifiable for some reason – possibly the software only runs on an older version of Linux or Microsoft Server because the language or libraries it depends on has been deprecated.

When I mean the code isn’t modifiable or updateable this can be for a variety of different reasons such as the language it was built in is no longer generally available or can’t be built on a more modern machine. Possibly, your company is already in the middle of updating/re-writing the legacy system or has lost the source code over the years. Over the years, I’ve spent time trying to decompile code and sometimes this works really well and other times it’s completed but the code is impossible to read.

Continue reading →

5 Ways to Increase CRM Usage

Implementing CRMS like Salesforce into an existing company can be really challenging if users aren’t interested in using it or resistant to change. I recall the first time I integrated Salesforce into an organization, we had a very difficult time getting the sales staff to actually use it. Eventually we found a way to get staff interested in using the CRM and stop using Google Docs or Excel sheets.
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Using Promises in Salesforce Lightning

It’s no secret that Salesforce Lightning is changing the way we develop for Salesforce. At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce introduced Salesforce Lightning and it is proving to change a lot of things we do on the platform and I’m sure it will make things a lot better for users in the long term. If you aren’t already familiar with Salesforce Lightning then you need to read my post called What is Salesforce Lightning. Continue reading →