The latest trend in web design and development is no-code. Well, it’s not exactly latest, the trend has been around for a while now. You can go back to the early 2000’s and point out numerous software apps and web offerings that would fall under the no-code umbrella.
However, it’s hard to argue that 2020 besides being dominated by a highly contagious respiratory virus pandemic, no-code has been thrown around a lot. If you visit sites like producthunt, you would know what I am talking about.
Apparently, rumours of Meteor.js demise have been greatly exaggerated. Back in March 2020, the Meteor team released version 1.10 which saw a plethora of updates to the universal app platform.
Admittedly, it has been quite a few years since I have worked with Meteor. I remember trying it in the early days and being wowed by its ability to allow you to build applications that bring the front and back-end together without needing to configure anything.
The signs have been there for a while now. Elon Musk is the eccentric real-life version of Tony Stark, who some believe will save the world with his forward-thinking investments and ideas like making electric vehicles cool or making his own rockets.
But, for all of Elon’s great and commendable achievements come some highly questionable decisions and remarks. Known for his non-corporate approach to communication, he has landed in hot water several times over the years.
If you have been watching the news of late and let’s be honest, who hasn’t given we are a part of an unprecedented global pandemic? Then you would have heard of the announcement of a contact tracing application you install on your phone which notifies you and others if you’ve been in contact with anyone who tests positive for COVID-19.
On the surface, every day Australians will hear the government say, “If everyone installs this, we can ease restrictions faster and flatten the curve by being able to control the spread” – but for those in tech like myself who are critical of the government’s ability to produce an app that won’t be a privacy nightmare, things are a little more convoluted.
When it comes to JavaScript frameworks, few can lay claim to the longevity of Ember which just turned eight years old. To give readers some perspective, Ember is about as old as AngularJS (the first version of Angular), older than React, older than Vue and many other options out there. It harks back to the days when IE6 was still a browser many of us had to support.
To the surprise of some who abandoned Ember (and JavaScript frameworks in general) years ago, Ember just released a large update which changes and improves Ember in many facets. For years, Ember has been trailing behind other frameworks and libraries. Even though updates were still being made, Ember has always felt like a relic of Web yesteryear.
People once thought the banking industry was too big to fail, some seriously big financial institutions ultimately proved that wrong during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 which saw many seemingly unsinkable companies go out of businesses.
Early 2019, after two deadly crashes of the allegedly bigger and better 737 MAX, the plane was grounded by countries around the world as people scrambled to find answers for what happened. After numerous investigations, the culprit turned out to be MCAS also known by its non-abbreviated mouthful of a name Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.
The hype surrounding Svelte right now is inescapable. Every blog post comment section, the article comment section on Dev.to or Twitter thread/hot take seems to solicit a response about Svelte.
If you are not familiar, Svelte is a Javascript library which leverages a compiler to turn your Svelte code into plain old Javascript and HTML. You write your applications inside of .svelte files and they get compiled to something that has no runtime.
Being a parent, as any other parent would attest is rewarding, but hard work. And nothing has made modern parenting more challenging than YouTube.
We managed to not expose our firstborn son to any TV or screens until he was two. We were doing well until we had a trip booked from Australia to the UK, which was a 23-hour trip. We bit the bullet and bought an iPad to load up with some activities for the journey and some carefully selected YouTube videos.
As ubiquitous as state management has become in front-end development, it is still a confusing magical black box to most developers. Data goes in, data goes out, and nobody thinks about what happens in-between.
Some developers believe the answer to the question in my title is: always. While some don’t believe in using state management at all and if you’re like me, the answer is: it depends.
When state management gets added to an application that meets the criteria for using it, a weight gets lifted off your shoulders, and things make sense. Prematurely introduce state management or use it in places where you shouldn’t, and your life becomes a tangled mess.
Testing is a crucial part of any modern development process. If you’re not testing your code, you might as well be writing it blindfolded and hoping when you push to production that it works, if the company doesn’t go bankrupt from all of the bugs first.
But, I am a realist. Being honest, we all start out wanting to build things right. We want to test everything, writing both unit and integration tests to make sure everything works as intended. The company you work for might even allow for time to write tests until reality hits you on the back of the head.