The history of Javascript, formally known as ECMAScript and originally Mocha, is a strange one. Originally developed by Brendan Eich at Netscape in ten days with the intention of creating a scripting language for the Web which could be picked up by new programmers, it has been praised and maligned in every corner of the Internet, by the same people in equal measure. The little language that could, or could at least try its hardest, has now spread past the browser to runtime environments like Node.js, game engines like Unity and “hybrid” mobile apps. This ubiquity is forcing the language to grow in scope and style dramatically.
Cloud and engineering
The Move to GitHub
At Made we’ve used GitHub for years for all of our public and open source projects. That has always been free, and the experience has always been great. We have been hosting our private repositories with another service for a really long time. However, the user experience, speed and feature set of GitHub that we get with our public repositories has finally led us to make the jump, and to migrate all of our repositories across to GitHub with a paid plan.
Brevity vs. Comprehensibility
We love using SCSS here at Made, and the way in which we use it is constantly evolving. However, one particular and admittedly quite clever feature of SCSS has bugged me from day one, which is referencing a parent selector inside the current one:
Spree Custom Gateway
Spree makes it easy to take payments from any Payment Service Provider, and in this post I will briefly walk you through the process of creating and using your own custom gateway.
SirTrevorJS: King of the WYSIWYGs
A lot of our projects include some sort of manageable content, whether it be landing pages, blog postings or news articles, so it’s important for us to be able to provide our clients with an interface that allows them to easily create content that looks great.
Feature testing with RSpec
We love writing tests at Made HQ. They are part of the foundation on which we work to provide our clients with stable deliveries. We work fast and deploy daily so we test vital paths of our applications using feature tests. We also unit test, albeit less, when we need to cover a range of edge cases.
How we communicate our ideas, or “English should still be our first language”
Our industry is all about the communication of ideas. It’s not just about being able to communicate our ideas to a machine – a big part of our job involves the ability to communicate ideas to both technical and non-technical people, as well as translating and solidifying ideas into usable products.
Microservices: Pros & Cons of Using Microservices On A Project.
When designing software, you would typically use classes, modules and patterns like SRP to separate concerns and isolate functionality within your codebase.
Scary New Code
I’ve been writing software on my own for years, but one of my biggest challenges since starting at Made has been learning how to work in a team and get up to speed with huge, alien codebases in a short amount of time.
An Argument for Immutable Class Design
If you write code you write bugs. It is a fact of life as a developer. The more code you write, the more complicated it gets and the more likely it will contain bugs. Consider this logic: