Not every team has a dedicated database administrator. I’ve **never** worked on a team that has had someone solely focused on making sure our tables are structured perfectly with all the forms of normalization being applied. I, like a lot of developers, have had to learn difficult lessons about database design the hard way by […]

There are lots of ways that we can judge other developers’ code. A lot of them are subjective like spacing, function names, and class names. When we do code reviews these are not helpful methods to judge the code and we instead need to use a better method. We need to use non-subjective metrics like […]

As developers, we spend a lot of time testing the code that we’ve written. Generally, this is a manual process where we write a little code and then manually enter some inputs to verify we get what we expect. What if instead of doing the same manual testing over and over again, we used a […]

One of the more annoying problems when working with data is creating a system to save data from RAM into long-term storage so it can be loaded back into RAM and processed at a later time. There are thousands of different file formats that allow us to take structured data, write it to storage, and […]

Onboarding a new developer to our team can be a complicated process. They need to fill out HR paperwork, get a development environment, and find a comfy place to work (along with a caffeinated beverage). Then someone needs to fill their head with all of the institutional knowledge they need to do their job. There […]

One of the most powerful parts of writing web applications in the modern era is how we can quickly create an application that does a lot with just a little bit of our code by using open-source packages. Have you ever wanted to contribute a package to the community for others to use? Maybe you […]

In the darker days of web application development, we essentially had two options for working with dependencies. The first is that we could put all the dependencies in a directory of our application and use them from there. This worked but could cause our application to balloon in size. The other option was to rely […]

As developers, we have times when we get to process a lot of data. Sometimes it’s a few kilobytes of data and we don’t need to worry about the performance because computers are so fast. When we’re looking at gigabytes or more of data then we need to be aware of the performance of our […]