Oh no, not another Vim article!
Cloud and engineering
Doing dumb things with Postgres
A couple of months ago I gave a talk about PostgreSQL, and specifically using the Array datatype, at London Ruby User Group and I wanted to take some time to dive into this in more detail.
Choosing the right supplier post IR35 reform
With the latest reforms to IR35 having come into effect on April 6th, public sector bodies (PSBs) are facing the mounting challenge of keeping teams filled. This, coupled with the Civil Service-wide recruitment freeze introduced in 2010, is a particular problem for PSBs tasked with delivering digital projects, where software engineering teams were once largely made up of contractors who now have an incentive to look elsewhere for work. The reforms are here to stay, so what options do PSBs have in terms of continuing to deliver good digital products?
Things We Learned Building a Complex React App
React is a fantastic tool for building frontends. We’ve been using it for small applications for a while, and recently used it for a more complex app. Given the library, and the mass of libraries you’ll use with it, are still brand new, we encountered many architectural and code challenges throughout development which haven’t been solved before.
Recruiting a tech team
Recruiting the right group of people is one of the most important parts of building a top software delivery team. In this article, we take a look at some things you should consider whilst recruiting, and a few things that you should try to avoid.
React and MVC
React is improving the way we build frontends, but I find common patterns are making our apps more complex to write and manage, and more difficult to understand.
Slicing code
The primary goal of slicing software is to make it cheap to ship, and inexpensive to ship additional features.
Using Ansible for infrastructure
For the last year or so, the majority of our new projects at Made Tech have used Ansible as our go-to tool for provisioning and configuring our servers with the software that runs on them. We’ve paired Terraform with Ansible and Chef previously for creating our cloud resources, but have recently been experimenting with using Ansible to see if the one tool was capable of both of these stages in our infrastructure setups. We’ve not been disappointed with our experiences so far.
The importance of software support and maintenance for all organisations
It’s rare to encounter an organisation where software isn’t an important aspect of their day-to-day operation. Whether it’s a small business with a simple website, an international retailer with an e-commerce store and a Warehouse Management System, or a charity organisation collecting, storing and reporting environmental data, at some point, each of those organisations will need to engage on some level with a piece of software in order to ensure its smooth operation.
How to give your application the support it needs
For many organisations with their own software application, whether it be a website, an internal tool or something else entirely, managing said application can be a source of frustration, particularly in the absence of an internal software team.
