A couple of weeks ago I embarked on my third trip to Denver to see our Arrow team over there. It’s 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 weren’t sure about and for Martin and I to have some insight into where the pain points might be working on the Arrow platform.
You will see the term “model” used a lot when looking at JavaScript applications that deal with data. But what is a model and how do they help us architect (or structure) code to be more predictable and scaleable.
A model is a set of properties that together hold the information we need to understand a single item. An example of one of these items might be a person or an address. We could model a person by holding details of the properties: name, age and date of birth. We could model an address by holding details of the properties: street, city, country, postal code. The properties we choose will be dependent on what information our application needs.
What is Reactive Programming and Why is it helpful
One of the hardest problems to solve in programming is handling changes over time. This is because changes can come from multiple places, are unknown and will not always come in the same sequence. Even so, we still need to base logic on what is currently known and so we often find that managing these changes result in a very complex system.
We have seen the huge benefits of pure functions for creating high quality and testable JavaScript. I’ve been applying the same understanding to UI components for a while now and am seeing these same benefits. It’s useful to take a look at what makes a “pure component” and how we can change the way we build websites to realise these benefits.
A “pure function” is a function that satisfies two conditions:
I’ve 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 innovation–so I’m 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 I’m starting to see some big advantages as well. Let’s consider a couple now.
Build Stuff and have fun doing it … that pretty much sums up much of my childhood. Looking back, it is the times when I have been creating that have made me the most empowered and motivated. A life of simply being a consumer fills me with dread. It is what we add to this world which gives us our achievements and much fulfilment.
Having fun is in your control
I was born and grew up in (and near) a simple fishing town called Tabaco on the south of the main island (Luzon) in the Philippines. We didn’t have a lot, what we did have was significantly more than most of the people around us but what we all had was imagination.
I’m a big fan of creating stories from what we achieve and what we experience. Over the last few months I’ve been trying to come up with different ways we can build achievements in to GigStamp.
Once we’ve finished the current round of work on allowing you to take photos to put into your GigStamp we will be rolling out the first of our more community features called “Collectives”. Collectives will be a way of us music fans to rally together. Are your mates trying to get to all gigs on a tour for your favourite artist? Do you have a regular group who get out regularly?
I’ve found myself asking a question regularly during projects, from the very early days when I didn’t know what I wanted with my work till these days when I often mentor and lead other developers.
“Do you trust me?”
It’s funny how it’s meaning can be so different depending on the situation we find ourselves in, and yet the impact of it’s answer consistently empowering … or productively destroying.
ES6 or ES2015 … has been changing the way we write JavaScript as it slowly becomes more and more popular and easier to integrate in to our existing workflows. It has brought some much needed improvements to enable us to write better code and make use of long-standing conventions.
We’ve made strides in the past to encourage the naming of functions in our code so that should they appear in the stack trace of an error you are given help to understand it. I was therefor worried when I started seeing this convention used a lot:
I first got started building with React over a year ago when I was on the labs team at Sainsbury’s. I have to admit when React first came to my attention I dismissed it as another fad because I thought JSX was the point. Whilst I saw some benefits I couldn’t see a game changer in that alone. However a few months after, whilst reading more I realised that the actual game changer with React was the virtual DOM and the immutable approach.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer
