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At MojoTech, we care about building great products, but more importantly, we care about building the right products.

The Product Manager is an essential player in the software development process. Yet, we often find ourselves answering a troubling question when sitting down with eager prospective clients.

Introduction

Running applications on the cloud is not a binary decision. You don’t just move to the cloud and call it a day. The journey to cloud-native starts with establishing business decisions that mandate that applications in your organization need to deploy faster, scale easier, and break less frequently.

I’ve been asked at least once “How can I get better at programming in a compositional style, with functions?” This question usually stems from someone trying to learn a language dedicated to functional programming and struggling to make the paradigm feel “natural”. As one of the more outspoken advocates of functional programming in the office, I thought I’d provide a “listicle” of tips in the inimitable style of BuzzFeed to address the question.

TypeScript provides some nice facilities for quick and easy error detection when writing React components. Writing React components in TypeScript isn’t hard, but getting the most out of higher-order components in TypeScript can be a bit tricky, especially when they need to be generic.

As consultants, our job is to provide the most value possible to our clients over the course of our engagement. As engineers, our desire is to build software that is a joy to work on. Thankfully, these goals are not mutually exclusive. In trying to meet both of them, it helps to focus on building well-designed applications. Since "well-designed" is a fairly nebulous term, I'll lean on [Sandi Metz] to provide a definition.

At MojoTech, we’ve had many internal discussions about the line between project and product management in a client-services product management model. But there is a product practice area that we use for almost all of our clients: Discovery facilitation — also known as, how to communicate with people and get what you need from them.

As a product manager, our job is to shepherd the client’s vision to help make it a reality, and along the way make suggestions and improvements based on our research and our own experiences. It is the latter part that can expose when we bring our biases to a project. Which is to be expected — we are only human after all, so no one can fault you for these!

We've yet to give our readers a "peek behind the curtain" and discuss some of the ins and outs of our engineering practices at MojoTech. In this post, I'd like to begin to talk about some of our practices and the way we work from an engineering perspective.