Over the last year I have been working hard during my 20% time, behind the scenes, towards a basic working version of Soniq. Soniq is a platform for instrumental teachers, it’s purpose is to make their lives easier and give them opportunity to build engaging learning experiences to complement lessons.
Once again, I have had a huge amount of help from a few Soniq Advisors, instrumental teachers with different backgrounds who have given a lot of valuable insight.
When deploying anything other than a simple POC or personal website, a reliable application will need Environments. What is the right pattern for implementing environments for local developers as well as shared ones like staging and production?
Let’s look at how Uniform separates your configuration and content. Then look at how we can migrate both to new higher environments as a feature progresses through it’s software development workflow.
Uniform Project
Within Uniform the “Project” is the recommended way to separate configuration and content between environments. The screenshot below shows three projects used for my demo website.
Uniform have just launched its new platform and a big part of that is Canvas. Canvas is a way to orchestrate the modern stack of micro-services and SaaS into a website or multiple websites.
It gives the software developer power to control the tech stack while at the same time giving a marketer or content designer the power to control what is eventually presented to the user.
EVERYONE has power šŖ what can go wrong š I’ve been taking a look.
Deploying JAMstack within an enterprise company comes with many
complications due to it’s scale. There is not only the large
number of pages to contend with, there are often restrictions
imposed on how we can deliver the solution.
This was the case at
Nationwide Building Society
where we delivered a new platform and a new JAMstack website. It
was great to be able to talk about our experience at
Uniform’s JAMstack for Sitecore virtual
conference. Rich James and I went
through our experience on Nationwide’s journey to Enterprise
JAMstack.
Planning out a large application can be a very daunting prospect, especially when it comes to considering all the ways in which it will be used. At Seccl, we break down our user interfaces and applications so that we are not just considering the pages.
We look at the ways people will journey through our applications; we then break it down to the ways someone might interact with a part of each journey; finally we look further into the individual pieces that you see on the screen.
A couple of weeks ago I embarked on my third trip to Denver to see our Arrow team over there. Itās always a very full but productive time visiting the guys there and this trip especially so.
As both Martin and I would be there at the same time we took the opportunity to organise a few team-wide sessions across the week.
Dave Taylor in the Arrow office Denver
We set-up 3 presentations and 4 open Q&A sessions. This was a great opportunity for the developers to highlight or get answers to areas they werenāt sure about and for Martin and I to have some insight into where the pain points might be working on the Arrow platform.
Iāve started as a technical lead and mentor to a team of developers co-located in the US and London. The company is a Fortune 500 company who are clearly investing in tech and have a hunger for innovationāso Iām really excited about being involved and where this team will go!
There are some clear challenges here. The biggest will be working with co-located teams whilst being based in Bath. On the face of it, this separation might seem counter-productive, however I am reserving judgement till a later date as Iām starting to see some big advantages as well. Letās consider a couple now.
Last year saw a new Terminator movie where we saw John Connor send Kyle Reese back to 1984 to protect his mother. Play Nicely, an interactive marketing agency based in Bristol went on a worldwide tour with a Kinect and a booth giving passers by the ability to turn into a āpersonalised liquid metal T-1000ā. They followed this tour and the release of the movie with a browser based experience which allowed anyone to take a selfie and see a personalised video of them turning into a T-800.
Last year I had the pleasure to work as a UI Lead for The BIO Agency and
Arrow Electronics. I joined the project a few months in to help the existing 8 Frontend developers
and fair few other team members across their disciplines with FE code architecture and in turn support Arrow’s growing team in Denver, Colorado.
We had a great relationship with the team at Arrow. I had never heard of them before, so it was interesting to hear that
many of the electronic products we use day to day have probably had parts supplied by them.
It was great to hear that the new responsive Econsultancy website
went live at the end of last year. I had a great time working with their
team who were all top technical and creative guys.
I particularly enjoyed their use of the Github workflow
which was great at ironing out issues and sharing the code knowledge.
The ui tech stack for this project included Sass with Inuit, Angular and we built
a lot of the initial mockups using the Assemble static site generator.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer
