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Untangling the web using the simplest language possible.


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Showing posts from June, 2018

What is Git and Version Control?

Today we have dev teams that can number in the hundreds, some working from different countries remotely, all working on a single code base; making changes sometimes in the same file.  Could you imagine passing around a thumb drive with your changes?  Or constantly having to plug in new changes?  Or someone deleting a critical file? Or changing some very complex code, forcing the team to go back in and do the same work all over again?  What a nightmare. Enter version control. Version control software allows us to have many different people working on the same files very easily.  It gives us the ability to put our changes into the code base (pushing or merging/pulling) easily, get updates and changes that others have made (pull or fetch), and allows us to make copies of the entire code base to work on instead of working on the "master" code. As an aside, Git is not the only version control software, but it is the only one I've used, and it is the only one I am

What is front end? Back end? Full stack?

JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Ruby, Node, PHP, Version Control, GIT, Java, JVM, React, Angular, Angular 2+, Redux, Vue, jQuery, Hadoop, WordPress, T-SQL, PostgreSQL, noSQL, es6, es7. ecma2015, babel, Webpack, Grunt, Gulp..... what the f%$k . When I first started in the web world I had no idea what a "Front End" or a "Back End" was, I knew that "Full Stack" meant doing both, but that didn't help much.  Engineering fields can be very intimidating, and many times we don't know what something is but there is often talk of things being "trivial", said usually with a condescending tone, and it scares us away from asking.  Well I don't believe in a dumb question.  If you don't know something it's because you were never taught it.  There are very few innate behaviors, like breathing.  Most of what we know is learned. So let's learn you real good like. Front End All bow to the mighty Front End Triad!  Front End  develo

What the hell is automated testing?

I was recently contacted by a recruiter wanting to submit for a position that specifically asked about my experience with Automated Testing ™.  Also if (read: when) I place something in Bold Italics  with a  ™ after I am being extremely sarcastic. I feel like automated testing is one of those things that is built up to be much more than it actually is.  It conjures images (at least in me) of the above; or a robot in lab automatically testing things, or  perhaps an AI system that just knows what to do. Well it turns out that automated testing is just a test or group of tests that you write once and then call whenever the tests are needed. What is a test? I'm so glad you asked!!  A test is just a bit of code that checks your other code.  But what the hell does that really mean? Say I have a function, it takes arguments, and returns a value (I know, sometimes I get  wild ): Now we want to test this function, so we'd write a test: Essentially we just wrote a second