Software Development – Page 2

Agility & Discipline

I recently finished reading The Land Is Ours by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi. The book fascinatingly narrates the lives of the first 6 black lawyers in South Africa, all practising in the early 1900s.

Synchronization with Domain Models in Angular Applications

On the plateaus of Ethiopia is where coffee was first grown. From there, Arab traders took the plant and started cultivating it in the Middle East. Yemen is where it is now believed they started drinking it. From the Middle East, it spread to different parts of North Africa, and to the rest of the world.

Domain Modelling in Angular Applications

There is a Ugandan story told of a traveller who went to a faraway land. Upon reaching his destination, he found great difficulty because he didn’t know the local language of the place he found himself in. Despite this, he attempted exploring and getting to know more of the place.

Inversion of Control with React Native Components

On 26 December 1945, the CFA Franc, a currency still used by many former French colonies in Africa, was created. At the time, after World War 2, the French Franc (the one actually used in France and previously used in the colonies) had been devalued to maintain a fixed exchange rate against the dollar, and France, in its gracious and loving paternity, didn’t want the exports from its colonies to receive a lower value, reducing the amount of money available in the colonial economy.

En-courage-ment

Software development is hard. And getting good at it is even harder. One regularly reads about the latest and greatest technology one has to know about, or the latest greatest technique that one has to adopt, or they are to be seen as ‘doing it all wrong’. Continuously up-skilling oneself with a deeper knowledge of current tools, languages and techniques, while at the same time learning new ones is quite a daunting task.

Testing React (& Native) Components

React is big. Really big. It is the web framework that you need to be doing right now. It was the Ruby on Rails of 2016. You had to be doing it with a double mocha. And a beard. And a comb-over. Unless you’re black. Or a woman. Or sane. Then maybe not a comb-over.

Pairing vs Pull Request Reviews

Some like them. Some hate them. But code reviews are a good thing. Some may think they are demigods who fart out perfect code, and therefore think them irrelevant. Others think they are absolutely terrible and don’t want to be openly found out, and are therefore scared of them. But they are good.

ECMA Specification Safari: Increment (and Decrement) Operators

Recently, I’ve started reading through the ECMA Script (JavaScript) specification to get a more in depth understanding of the language I seem to be using every day. There are some interesting things I am coming across. Today’s interesting thing is increment and decrement operators.

What Is A Class (and why to avoid static methods)

There are many debates in software development, from how to test, to languages, to frameworks, and everything under the sun. Despite my oblivion to the technical details of many of these debates, what I’ve seen is that many of them hover around the lofty heights of roof trusses without understanding the subterranean foundations that build the houses they are comparing (wow, that was poetic: +1500 hipster points).

Why Are We Mocking Like This?

People like labels that they can classify themselves under. It’s a nice way to have a club you can belong to, and an opposing club you can speak against. In political rhetoric here in South Africa, one group of people will feel complemented when calling them ‘capitalist’, whereas another will feel completely insulted. It’s the same with the term ‘socialist’. This phenomenon seems to also exist in the software development sub-genre of reality. Of late, I’ve been reading and discussing the tensions between the unit-testing practices of those who call themselves ‘mockists’ and others who call them classicists.