Javascript

The History of DivOps: The Tools that Led Us to Today

Published Jul 10, 2024

Updated Jul 10, 2024

1 min read

In this JS Drop, Jonathan Creamer, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, shares key insights on the history of DivOPs tooling, starting in the days before advancements like Webpack bundles.

Jonathan discusses the emergence of bundlers like Webpack and the role of Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) in modern web development. Bundlers have revolutionized code organization by allowing developers to modularize their code, enhancing maintainability and scalability. ASTs enable bundlers to efficiently analyze and transform code, optimizing the development process.

In the early days of web development, developers had to manually order their scripts to ensure proper dependencies. However, the introduction of tools like AMD and RequireJS transformed the landscape by enabling modular code organization. This shift empowered developers to focus on writing modular code, making their projects more manageable and adaptable to changes.

Efficient code management and build automation are vital aspects of modern web development. The podcast highlights the continuous innovation in build tools such as Grunt, Gulp, Vite, and Parcel. These tools automate repetitive tasks, optimize code, and streamline the development workflow, allowing developers to save valuable time and effort.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

Acing the Interview for Software Engineers with Anthony D. Mays

In this episode of the Modern Web Podcast, Anthony D. Mays discusses code exercises, landing your first job, and how to succeed in interviews. He shares his personal journey to becoming a software engineer and career coach, and emphasizes the importance of not only having technical knowledge but also a strong problem-solving process. The conversation also touches on the role of senior engineers in guiding and empowering junior engineers, the interview processes at different companies, and tips for success in interviews. In this conversation, Anthony covers the interview process and how candidates can best prepare for technical interviews. emphasizing the importance of collaborative problem-solving and being authentic in interviews. They also explore the idea of secret questions and whether or not they are effective in assessing a candidate's skills. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction 03:24 The Importance of Problem-Solving Process in Interviews 06:32 Guiding and Empowering Junior Engineers 10:20 Understanding Different Interview Processes 19:51 Tips for Success in Interviews 24:57 Collaborative Problem-Solving in Technical Interviews 26:26 The Effectiveness of Secret Questions 29:42 Defining the Interview Process 30:37 The Importance of Authenticity 32:30 Interviewer Training and Feedback 35:18 Selecting the Right Opportunity Follow Anthony D. Mays Social Media Twitter Linkedin Github Bluesky Download this episode here....

Aug 16, 2024

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These JavaScript Tools Make Collaboration and Deployment Easier with Jack Herrington

Join Jack Herrington and Tracy Lee at CascadiaJS 2024 as they talk about content creation, experimenting with new tools, and continuous learning. They cover some of the latest in what’s going on in the Vercel, Next.js, and Deno Deploy ecosystems, and what these teams are doing to enable easy deployment and better community collaboration. Tracy and Jack's discussion highlights the lack of educational resources on advanced web development topics. This scarcity poses an opportunity for developers who want to showcase their expertise in areas like app router and React server components. By actively engaging in knowledge sharing, developers can demonstrate their deep understanding of these complex concepts and set themselves apart from the competition. Jack emphasized Vercel's role in simplifying deployment with its easy commands and Next.js integration for seamless collaboration and performance. Next.js was highlighted for its advanced features and simplified development process, including efficient routing and SEO benefits. Deno Deploy, built on Deno, offers serverless deployment without traditional infrastructure management, focusing on code writing and scalability. Throughout, the importance of community and knowledge sharing in platforms like Vercel, Next.js, and Deno Deploy was underscored, enabling developers to share, receive feedback, and stay updated with advancements. Download this episode here....

Jul 18, 2024

1 min

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How to Invest in New Software Engineering Talent with Shashi Lo

In this episode of the Modern Web Podcast, we sit down with Shashi Lo, Senior UX Engineer at Microsoft and the founder of the Gridiron Survivor project. Shashi shares his approach to mentoring junior developers by helping them bridge the gap between boot camp and their first job in tech. We cover the challenges of onboarding, the importance of code reviews, and how companies can better support new talent by investing in mentorship and training. Shashi also talks about his experience with building a community of learners, the process of de-risking junior candidates, and why companies should be more proactive in nurturing the next generation of developers. 00:00 - Meet Shashi Loh 02:25 - The Gridiron Survivor Project 05:02 - The Importance of Code Reviews 07:25 - Teaching the Basics of Project Communication 09:47 - Code Reviews as a Learning Tool 12:06 - Why Shashi Mentors: Giving Back to the Community 14:26 - The Importance of De-Risking Junior Candidates 16:41 - Building in Public: Transparency and Learning 19:00 - Assessing Candidates for the Gridiron Survivor Project 21:25 - The Power of Simple Coding Tests 23:45 - Scaling Up Skills: From Small Tasks to Big Projects 26:07 - Should Companies Be Doing This? 28:25 - Finding Hidden Gems in the Job Market 30:47 - The Challenges of Filtering Candidates 33:02 - Where to Find Shashi Online 34:38 - Closing Remarks Follow Shashi Lo on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/shashiwhocodes Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shashilo/ Github: https://github.com/shashilo Sponsored by This Dot....

Sep 5, 2024

2 mins

Engineering LeadershipMentorship

D1 SQLite: Schema, migrations and seeds

I’ve written posts about some of the popular ORM’s in TypeScript and covered their pros and cons. Prisma is probably the most well known and Drizzle is a really popular up and comer. I like and use ORM’s in most of my projects but there’s also a camp of folks who believe they shouldn’t be used. I started a small Cloudflare Workers project recently and decided to try using their D1 SQLite database without adding any ORM. This is the first post in a 2 part series where we’ll explore what this experience is like using only the driver and utilities made available in the Wrangler CLI. Introduction If you’re unfamiliar with Cloudflare D1 - it’s a distributed SQLite database for the Cloudflare Workers platform. Workers are lightweight serverless functions/compute distributed across a global network. The platform includes services and API’s like D1 that provide extended capabilities to your Workers. At the time of this writing, there are only two ways to interact with a D1 database that I’m aware of. * From a Worker using the D1 Client API * D1 HTTP API In this 2 part series, we will create a simple Workers project and use the D1 Client API to build out our queries. Getting Started For this tutorial, we’ll create a simple Cloudflare Worker project and treat it like a simple node script/http server to do our experiments. The first step is initializing a new Cloudflare Worker and D1 database: ` ` We need to take our binding and add it to our project wrangler.toml configuration. Once our binding is added we can re-generate the types for our Worker project. ` We now have our DB binding added to our project Env types. Let’s add a simple query to our worker script to make sure our database is setup and working: ` Start the development server with npm run dev and access the server at http://localhost:8787 . When the page loads we should see a successful result {"1 + 1":2} . We now have a working SQLite database available. Creating a schema Since we’re not using an ORM with some kind of DSL to define a schema for our database, we’re going to do things the old fashioned way. “Schema” will just refer to the data model that we create for our database. We’ll define it using SQL and the D1 migrations utility. Let’s create a migration to define our initial schema: ` For our demo purposes we will build out a simple blog application database. It includes posts, authors, and tags to include some relational data. We need to write the SQL in our migration to create all the tables and columns that we need: ` The SQL above defines our tables, columns, and their relations with foreign keys. It also includes a join table for posts and tags to represent a many-to-many relationship. If you don’t have a lot of experience writing SQL queries it might look a little bit intimidating at first. Once you take some time to learn it it’s actually pretty nice. DataLemur is a pretty great resource for learning SQL. If you need help with a specific query, Copilot and GPT are quite good at generating SQL queries. Just make sure you take some time to try to understand them and check for any potential issues. After completing a migration script it needs to be applied: ` I added the --local flag so that we’re working against a local database for now. Typing our Schema One of the downsides of our ORMless approach is we don’t get TypeScript types out of the box. In a smaller project, I think the easiest approach is just to manage your own types. It’s not hard, you can even have GPT help if you want. If managing type definitions for your schema is not acceptable for your project or use case you can look for a code generation tool or switch to an ORM / toolset that provides types. For this example I created some basic types to map to our schema so that we can get help from the lsp when working with our queries. ` Seeding development data Outside of our migrations, we can write SQL scripts and execute them against our D1 SQLite database using wrangler. To start we can create a simple seeds/dev.sql script to load some initial development seed data into our local database. Another example might be a reset.sql that drops all of our tables so we can easily reset our database during development as we rework the schema or run other experiments. Since our database is using auto incrementing integer ID’s, we can know up front what the ID’s for the rows we are creating are since our database is initially empty. This can be a bit tricky if you’re using randomly generated ID’s. In that case you would probably want to write a script that can collect ID’s of newly created records and use them for creating related records. Here we are just passing the integer ID directly in our SQL script. As an example, we know up front that the author Alice Smith will have the id 1, Bob Johnson 2, and so on. Post_tags looks a little bit crazy since it’s just a join table. Each row is just a post_id and a tag_id. (1, 1), (1 2), etc. Here’s the code for a dev seed script: ` Here’s the code for a reset script - it’s important to remember to drop the migrations table in your reset so you can apply your migrations. ` Using the wrangler CLI we can execute our script files against our local development and remote d1 database instances. Since we have already applied our migrations to our local database, we can use our dev.sql seed script to load some data into our db. ` The Wrangler output is pretty helpful - it lets us know to add the --remote flag to run against our remote instance. We can also use execute to run commands against our database. Lets run a select to look at the data added to our posts table. ` This command should output a table showing the columns of our db and the 7 rows we added from the dev seed script. Summary Using wrangler and the Cloudflare D1 platform we’ve already gotten pretty far without an ORM or any other additional tooling. We have a simple but effective migrations system in place and some initial scripts for easily seeding and resetting our databases. There are also some other really great things built-in to the D1 platform like time travel and backups. I definitely recommend at least skimming through the documentation at some point. In the next post we will start interacting with our database and sample data using the D1 Client API....

Aug 30, 2024

5 mins

Cloudflare

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The History of DivOps: The Tools that Led Us to Today

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Acing the Interview for Software Engineers with Anthony D. Mays

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D1 SQLite: Schema, migrations and seeds