mojo - kn

What makes for a good software project, from an engineering standpoint? There are projects that are a joy to work on, and others that are a drag. The industry has accumulated enough wisdom to be able to name a few practices that can help us keep our projects in the former category. These are a handful of my favorite practices and tools for maintaining the joy.

Implementing Digital Transformation In Your Business

It’s one thing to recognize the importance of DT, but making it a reality in your business is a different animal altogether.

I used to be a product manager at a company that will remain nameless. Here’s how projects worked: First I would put together a project request form that contained a lengthy requirements section. After the engineering team approved this project request, we’d spend a couple of weeks together documenting the business requirements.

I created a Node JS project recently that required fetching some data from an external API.

Setting goals

In order to accomplish anything important, you need to set multiple goals. Your goals need to be both in the big and in the small. The small goals that you set every day will help you hit the larger ones in the end.

In our fast-moving world, it’s easy to overlook the amount of effort and time necessary to achieve true mastery of a skill. We millennials are obsessed with instant gratification. We often give up too soon and, in doing so, develop poor habits, relationships, and skills. In our minds, persistence is confused with stubbornness, and repetition is confused with a sign of stupidity.

In the article, Why I Recommend Against Using Cucumber, the author Jason Swett, stipulates some problems with how he sees Cucumber being used incorrectly, and that even if used correctly, he posits that Cucumber has a “small negative value.” While people’s testing practice may vary, and there is more than one way to skin a cat, based on our experience using Cucumber at MojoTech on many Ruby projects, I felt the need to offer a rebuttal because Mr. Swett’s piece does not address the primary benefit of Cucumber when disparaging its merits.

These days, it seems that almost everybody wants to learn to code — and if you believe all the boot camps and book titles that have surfaced over the past two decades, you might think it's also easy to do.

Intro to Cloud-Native Terms

The definition of what makes something a cloud-native application can be a little (pardon the pun) cloudy. This lack of clarity is curious given that by 2020, it is predicted that the "Cloud Shift" will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending, making cloud computing the next major technological disruptor.

A lot of projects we work on at MojoTech require the UI to be accessible in many different locales. Recently we have been working with a global retailer to build an internationalized React client for their B2B ordering platform. One of the core requirements was for this to be accessible throughout Europe and the United States. This includes translating strings to different languages, and formatting numbers, dates, and currencies to the user's preferred locale.