Category: Software Engineering

Warning: Minor rant below. I can’t say how my mind got on this topic, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about our industry’s approach to software development. In many ways, software development is getting better. It’s ahead of where we were when I started as a professional developer over 20 years ago. But while…

Engineering is just for geeks with pocket protectors, right? Engineering is all about math, formula, and intensive study of existing builds, right? I have done a good amount of software education over the years. Some as a student, and some as a teacher. The book “A Whole New Engineer” is a refreshing step back from…

From the outside, developers are sometimes seen as trolls living under a bridge. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. How about this: strange wizards who wield unknowable powers to make things work. Or perhaps this: t-shirt-wearing loners who subsist on junk food and never go outside. Wrong on all accounts. They are actually quite normal…

As I wrote in Part 1 of my REST API with AWS series, development coding shouldn’t happen within the browser due to the lack of good practices such as reuse of functions, source control, and continuous integration. But there is a slight caveat to that: AWS Cloud9. With this service, we essentially get a development…

In my previous post, we stood up a Vue.js site as a single-page application where the entire site was a single index.html file. In this post, I am going to use the Vue CLI to scaffold out our solution a little more. First, we will need to install the Vue CLI. sudo npm install -g…

I have written a few blog posts on Angular in the past, mostly because it’s a framework I leverage quite often and am usually very pleased with how it works. But Vue.js is another framework that I’ve been playing around with lately, so I wanted to quickly write down some of my initial thoughts on…

As software developers, we have become pretty good at logging server-side errors. When something blows up on the server, it gets logged to a file, database, or somewhere we can look at later. But what about errors that happen on the client side? What about an event occurring at the browser that we want to…

Microsoft recently put Blazor into official preview. If you’ve never heard of Blazor, it started as a proof-of-concept project by Steve Sanderson with the goal to build a client web UI framework based on .NET and WebAssembly. With Blazor, we get the ability to run C# in the browser instead of JavaScript. Hence C# all…

Are we there yet? Anyone with kids has probably heard this during a long car trip. Anyone in the software industry has probably heard this too. Software development projects can be huge investments of time and energy, and often weeks can go by without showing a lot of return on that investment. We often try…