Diary of a Developer

Jul 16, 2016

FullStack 2016 - the conference on JavaScript, Node & Internet of Things

TL;DR: FullStack 2016 rocked, and OMG progressive web apps

I spent the last three days immersed in the world of FullStack 2016 - the conference on JavaScript, Node & Internet of Things. Broadly speaking, the sessions I attended covered new and future JavaScript features,...

May 2, 2016

A Moment in Timezone

I noticed recently that an application in production was failing acceptance tests which checked that a user’s selected journey date was correctly displayed (and logged to the database). The root cause of this was that the BrowserStack server the tests were running on was an...

Apr 6, 2016

Why isn’t mocha running all my tests?

I noticed earlier that only 3 of my tests were running :(

Here is my npm test script:

"scripts": { "test": "babel-node --recursive test/**/*.spec.js" }

This bit: —-recursive test/**/*.spec.js is supposed to pick up all files ending in spec.js in...

Mar 21, 2016

Redux Notes

Principles of redux

Use pure functions (those which rely only upon the input args, do not mutate the input args and do not do anything else such as make a database call)

State is kept in a single store

State is read-only and can...

Mar 2, 2016

Refactoring to ES6 and back again

I’ve been doing a lot of linting on a repo that recently got upgraded to Node. This mainly involves changing things to the ES6 syntax since the code was written in ES5. I used airbnb eslint to help me flag stylistic errors and remaining ES5...

Feb 2, 2016

Render Testing and Debugging on Mobile Devices

As featured on the Trainline engineering blog :D

Debug all the things!

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time render checking and debugging various features recently. Unit and acceptance tests are essential for assessing the functionality of your application, but rendering is...

Jan 29, 2016

iframe iPhone 6 bugs and quirks

A lot of my time over the past couple of days has been spent trying to work out why a Google DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) banner was rendering perfectly and responsively on desktop browsers and most mobile phone devices but not on the...

Jan 3, 2016

I love it when a plan goes completely wrong!

I’ve spent the last few days working through a MEAN tutorial I started months ago but never made that much progress on. I remember my poor pair partner David’s face when I exclaimed ‘oh, looks like I don’t have Node or Java installed on this...

Jan 1, 2016

New years resolutions

Blog more
Mentor at Codebar
Attend meetups that provide pizza, beer and JavaScript

Nat x

Oct 18, 2015

Node Streams

Streams are a way of inputting and outputting data. They can be readable or writable (or both) and can be paused and resumed.

Using the filesystem module we just saw, we can create a stream to read data as below. The data is read in...

Oct 17, 2015

Node fs Module

File System (fs) is a very useful module that comes with the node installation by default. It can be used to read and write data from the file system on your computer.

Below is an example of how it can be used in an asynchronous...

Oct 16, 2015

Node Events

Callbacks are great, but when there are more than two events and/or they need to be called multiple times, events are used. They’re more flexible and more powerful… Plus you can kind of switch them on and off as you please.

Instead of using asynchronous...

Oct 15, 2015

The wonderful world of Node

I’ve been having a lot of fun learning about Node.js this week. I’m excited to be finally working with JavaScript on the server side, after doing quite a lot of JavaScript things on the front end recently. (Blog post on React.js coming soon...

Aug 21, 2015

Day 55 | Thanks for the memories

16 of the 24 amazing people I spent my summer with

I am feeling a mixture of emotions today. June 2015 have now officially graduated and I’m so immensely proud of what all the groups produced for their final projects and of...

Aug 14, 2015

Day 50 | Final Project week 1 summary

It’s been a funny old week. The reason these blog posts are getting so few and far between is that I am spending every waking moment planning, coding, testing, researching or at the very least thinking about this project.

We’ve had a number of setbacks...

Aug 11, 2015

Day 47 | Issue central

All hell has broken loose. We’ve now started our final projects.

Day 1 was pretty much a disaster. Based on our initial discussions and research, not knowing if one team member was in or out and a general lack of excitement about the project theme...

Aug 7, 2015

Day 45 | Week 9 learning plan

Most Important Things I Learned:

• Good communication in the most important thing in group project work
• It’s often better to implement a sub-optimum solution to a difficult problem (e.g. database associations) and then let it lead you to a better solution to...

Aug 6, 2015

Day 44 | I actually need to write a todo list...

Today we’ve been working on the Pairing Matrix project again, with all teams operating with skeleton staff. In a way it’s easier with less people to cause merge conflicts, but it meant we couldn’t move ahead with any extra features. We implemented a blacklist, and...

Aug 5, 2015

Day 43 | Penultimate Projects

So.. this week we’ve been working in groups on a ‘Pairing matrix website’ project. I think one of the reasons for this is so that the coaches can point and go ‘See, it’s actually bloody hard to organise you guys into pairs every day!’. The...

Aug 3, 2015

Day 41 | Many things todo

This weekend I made a super cool todo list app. It does everything it’s supposed todo and more, but I’m slightly worried about how big my HTML page is now. It’s stuffed full of angular directives and looks like Bootstrap has thrown up on it....

Jul 31, 2015

Day 40 | Week 8 learning plan

Most Important Things I Learned:

• Protractor and karma testing
• Angular setup

Things I Struggled With The Most:

• Server setup issues
• Making a second API call to Github to retrieve number of repos for each user displayed in search results....

Jul 30, 2015

Day 39 | Testing times

My brain is hurting again. I’ve spent a lot of today debugging server setup issues and getting in the middle of a debate about Rack vs Sinatra as a method of serving up Single Page Applications. In the middle of all this my server file...

Jul 28, 2015

Day 37 | Are you .gitignoring me?

Today I worked on a mix of AngularJS and some previous challenges. I’ve done a little bit of Angular before, at a time that now seems like forever ago. I like to call that period the ‘pre-Rubyist era’. It was in March 2015, or thereabouts....

Jul 27, 2015

Day 36 | Welcome to Natstagram! (1 like)

I think these weekend challenges are getting longer y’know… They’re also getting more and more interesting, and more satisfying to complete. Our weekend challenge this week was to recreate Instagram, an immensely popular but strangely simple site. I use ‘simple’ in a rather loose sense....

Jul 24, 2015

Day 35 | Week 7 learning plan

Most Important Things I Learned:

• Rails! I am feeling a lot more familiar with rails after the weekend challenge
• Stuff about databases - how tables are joined and accessed

Things I Struggled With The Most:

• Active records associations part of the...

Jul 23, 2015

Day 34 | Off the Rails II (the sql)

The entire cohort have been totally confused by database associations for the last two days. The principle of what we’re trying to do makes sense, but accurately setting up relationships and expressing them or their related methods in Ruby - in the correct model or...

Jul 21, 2015

Day 32 | Off the Rails

This week is Rails week. Everyone has an opinion on Rails, ranging from ‘Easier and better than Sinatra’ to ‘I don’t understand how it’s doing stuff for me’ to ‘I don’t like this Rails Voodoo magic, make it stop!’. There are some very nice features...

Jul 20, 2015

Day 31 | How to: Host your static site on Heroku

Hello blog fans. I’ve spent the last couple of days working on the bowling challenge again, and it now includes an interface (HTML, CSS & jQuery). It’s pretty much done at last, so I decided to host it on Heroku here. Heroku is...

Jul 17, 2015

Day 30 | Week 6 learning plan

Most Important Things I Learned:

• Constant communication is really important in a group situation, to make sure the project is moving in the right direction and to make sure bad merge conflicts don’t happen
• How to be agile and cut features/change plans...

Jul 15, 2015

Day 28 | Makerthon part 1

A makerthon is basically a mini hackathon, except there’s no prize at the end. The aim is to build a fully tested product in an agile way, using kanban and ensuring regular team stand ups are held. It’s better to create something that works and...

Jul 14, 2015

Day 27 | Spring cleaning a database and freezing time

Today we resumed work on the extended Chitter challenge. We created a nice interface and sorted out some of the navigation issues, so the whole thing looks like more of a working product now. We definitely learnt a lot from the project, even if it...

Jul 13, 2015

Day 26 | Error: Floor has already been spied upon

I spent most of Sunday working on the Bowling Challenge, which was essentially a day long logic problem. So I had a very nice day :) The challenge is to model a bowling game which I took to mean a game with random inputs. The...

Jul 10, 2015

Day 25 | Week 5 learning plan

Most Important Things I Learned:

• Hoisting
• API calls/JSON files
• CSS transitions

Things I Struggled With The Most:

• Google maps geolocation
• Working with Ruby and JavaScript at the same time. Working out what will be passed...

Jul 9, 2015

Day 24 | API days

The tube strike threw a bit of a spanner in the works today by preventing a third of the class from getting in. A lot of the people who did make it in had to get up really early and leave early, but we managed...

Jul 8, 2015

Day 23 | AJAX.. but not then bathroom cleaner or the football team

This week has involved a couple of famililar topics in the shape of HTML and CSS, so I’ve been able to give myself a bit of time off in the evenings! I’ve been showing a couple of people how to make pages more presentable and...

Jul 6, 2015

Day 21 | Chitter chatter & JavaScript

Hellooo week 5! We’re really in the thick of it now. In less than two weeks we will lose the ‘juniors’ label and be fast approaching our final projects. This is going way too quickly! I am having the time of my life and in...

Jul 3, 2015

Day 20 | Week 4 learning plan

Most Important Things I Learned:

• Lots of datamapper configuration details!
• Testing with databases using factory girl and database cleaner
• How passwords work
• How controllers should be organised (e.g. users/new structure as a convention for creating something, delete methods...

Jul 2, 2015

Day 19 | Factory Girls working overtime

I had a great time today. Thursdays are fast becoming my favourite day of the week at Makers. We usually spend the first day or two of the week getting stuck into a new topic, Wednesday making some good progress and Thursday marvelling at the...

Jul 1, 2015

Day 18 | Salty hashes

Today we mainly focussed on implementing user sign ups and password security. It’s kind of scary building things that actually require a layer of security and I’m trying to pay extra attention to that element.

I found out about how passwords are encrypted (or hashed),...

Jun 30, 2015

Day 17 | Building a real thing

This week I was excited to start learning about databases. The last two days have been spent getting to grips with the setup and using Heroku, a super awesome tool that takes about 2 minutes to set up and gets your app online just as...

Jun 26, 2015

Day 16 | Plane.exit returns false

I spent the weekend having a lovely time in Copenhagen. The only non-lovely thing about it was that I spent several hours on a plane home that was going nowhere with no wifi or place to charge my laptop. Unable to look anything up, I...

Jun 26, 2015

Day 15 | Friday learning plan

Most Important Things I Learned:

• How the internet works!
• How to use BDD, controllers, views and sessions
• Debugging is awesome. The alumni helpers helped me a lot with this and I’m now a lot more able to identify the cause...

Jun 25, 2015

Day 14 | Why is my test like an NHS ward? It's full of bugs

Today was another great day. Kate and I were super excited to combine forces and create a game which allowed the placement and striking of battleships. That probably doesn’t sound very exciting but every little win not only resulted in tests going green and passing,...

Jun 24, 2015

Day 13 | Looking up

Today was a pretty good day. For the last week or so I’ve been a bit worried about whether I’ve been understanding enough and whether I’ve been implementing the concepts correctly but today I feel pretty good about everything! The three things that really pleased...

Jun 23, 2015

Day 12 | What is the internet?

This week we’re learning about a newfangled invention called… the ‘internet’. We played a game in our stand up to help illustrate how http requests are sent out to servers, what controllers and views do to build pages and retrieve app logic, and how responses...

Jun 22, 2015

Day 11 | Takeaway injection

I spent a lot of this weekend working on the TWO challenges we were set. Do you know how long it took me to write the bit of code below? This code is most of the answer to the ‘inject challenge’ (the other bit of...

Jun 19, 2015

Day 10 | Summing up the week

Most Important Things I Learned:

• Pairing is really hard! Tansaku, thanks for your advice on this
• It’s not about finishing the task, it’s about how much you learnt on the way
• The seniors struggled too, and most of my cohort...

Jun 16, 2015

Day 7 | A new approach

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the simplest system you can build to validate the fundamental concept of what you want to build. An MVP sequence is a series of systems of gradually increasing complexity that take you slowly towards a more complex system that...

Jun 15, 2015

Day 6 | Uphill Battleships

Week two already? My how time flies! Speaking of flying, this weekend I completed the Airport Challenge which was our cohort’s weekend homework. At first I massively overcomplicated it by adding in methods that I later realised might not be necessary to satisfy the user...

Jun 12, 2015

Day 5 | Double Trouble

Since there are an odd number in our cohort, today I ended up in a three instead of a pair for the day’s activities. I was a little aprehensive about this because I’d been told it was quite difficult. In actual fact it turned out...

Jun 11, 2015

Day 4 | BROKEN Boris Bikes

Today was a day of ups and downs. I’ve discovered that it’s incredibly difficult to switch pairing partners part way through a project. It’s all good experience and practice of course, as there will be plenty of times in our future jobs when we have...

Jun 10, 2015

Posts

Principles of redux