Otto is marketed as the successor to Vagrant, the development tool that has been used by developers across the globe for the past five years.
Made Tech Blog
How to Create a Better Rails Development Environment with Docker Compose
I’ve seen quite a few articles recently detailing the steps to creating a simple Ruby on Rails development environment without Vagrant. I’ve found a few issues with these that make the environment somewhat unfeasible for real use. Hopefully, by the end of this article you will have a Docker-based development environment that can actually be used for real development.
Testing without QA
We have an almost continual dialogue on how to improve the quality of the software that we’re involved in delivering. One of the conscious decisions that we’ve made is that we don’t make use of a dedicated QA or test role.
Practical Checkout Flow Enhancements
At Made we pride ourselves on crafting websites that deliver a great aesthetic, and a rich user experience.
Running a Retrospective
A few weeks ago, Fareed wrote about his favourite retrospectives. I wanted to follow up on this and outline what I’d consider essentials for a good retrospective.
Comparing OOP and Component Based Design
In this article I’d like to discuss two concepts that you might not immediately think to compare. I’ve written previously on keeping your stylesheets modular and also on boundaries in object oriented design, so today I bring the two loosely together.
Agile Problem Solving: Moving as a Team
We’re a company dedicated to producing quality software our clients love, and we’re constantly striving to refine and improve the processes we use to do so. With that in mind, getting things “Done done” is a massive priority for us, and anything that hinders that ability is something we will always work to remove.
Componentisation and the Single Responsibility Principle
Keeping a good separation of concerns means writing code that only handles as much as it needs to. It’s a concept that should affect every piece of code you write, from class definitions to database tables. Only store the data which is relevant. Only encapsulate the logic which is covered by the responsibility of your class. My colleague wrote about this recently when discussing Inheritance and Composition.
Internal vs External Quality of Software
Many studies have been conducted in an attempt to formalise the quality of software. Some quality models have been established, like SQuaRE by Consortium for IT Software Quality, which takes into consideration 5 key points: Reliability, Efficiency, Security, Maintainability and (adequate) Size.
Pull requests and Continuous Integration
A few months ago at Made Tech the Finery team switched to GitHub. Before the move we pushed commits directly into the master branch. Commit notifications with links to the diffs would then come up on the Finery channel on our HipChat server, and members of the team could review the commits at their own leisure. There was no commitment to code review.