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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

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.

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.…

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. …

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.…

What is ORM

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. …

5 Tips for Finding Amazing React Components

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.…

What are Design Patterns

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. …