Tools

Cloudflare Dev Workshop 2020 In mid-February, I had the privilege to attend the first Melbourne Cloudflare dev event. This was just one of a series of sessions they ran across the country to reach out to developers and help educate people around their thinking and the...

Disclaimer: this approach won’t be suitable for everybody, please factor in your particular requirements before using it.

The Why

Towards the end of 2018, our client started to move our codebase from AngularJS to Angular 7+ (now 8). While this, in itself, is a great move, it completely broke our A/B testing capabilities. (What's A/B Testing?) Implementing deep changes  to our Angular applications would be much more challenging. The methods we used to amend code on bootstrap of AngularJS applications are no longer available in Angular2+. If you are interested in A/B testing in AngularJS applications, you can read about our previous approach and Adobe setup. While some A/B testing can, and should, be done from the backend, this article will focus on the frontend approach.

Gather round disciples, your master is finally ready to reveal the ultimate secrets of the senior developers. Learn how to transform complex, unreadable code into poetry. Or, more accurately, learn what goes through an old developer's head when he's trying to clean up some dodgy code.

AppSync integrates seamlessly with a DynamoDB database. And as demonstrated in my previous article, AWS Amplify CLI can create the DynamoDB tables and generate the API CloudFormation infrastructure from an annotated GraphQL schema. However, using a relational data source with AppSync is more complex as...

Code reviews are important. They improve code quality, share technical knowledge and keep everyone up to date on what's going on in your codebase. Some Shiners have recently started using a new tool called Upsource that has helped us become quicker and more effective at code review.

ns

Native-what?

If you’re anything like myself before embarking on this project then you might wonder the same thing. Everyone has heard of React Native, it’s a popular technology enabling a cross-platform mobile development experience, but not so many have crossed paths with Nativescript, or {N}. Nativescript is a framework with a similar goal to React Native, providing the ability to publish native apps for both major platforms, iOS and Android, whilst only maintaining a single (mostly) JavaScript codebase.  It is available in three flavours: standard, Angular, and Vue.js, allowing developers with experience in the latter two frameworks to use their existing skills whilst building for mobile. Put simply, it’s a JavaScript runtime inside a native app, translating code on the fly into native elements.  In this post, I’m going to tell you about a few of the nice experiences we’ve had recently developing with Nativescript, as well as a few of the not so nice issues that were encountered, and whether we’d use it again.