Category: Software Engineering
Design – Executive Summary
The pull to start writing code is strong when building a new system. It feels urgent, but it isn’t the most important thing you should be doing… When people think of software development they often think of a programmer typing 0s and 1s into a green screen all alone in a room drinking Mountain Dew….
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Creating a Barcode Scanner App with Ionic
Scanning a barcode or a QR code is a pretty common business request. Luckily, almost all users walk around with devices capable of scanning barcodes: their phones. In this blog post, we are going to step through creating a mobile scanner application using Ionic, Xcode, and an iPhone. Create a blank app called “IonicCamera”: ionic…
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Automated Testing – Executive Summary
Automated testing is something developers talk a lot about. But what is automated testing, and why is it important? Unit testing usually means testing a piece of software in isolation, away from the rest of the code base. Sometimes this entire topic falls under the broad heading of unit testing. Unit testing typically doesn’t include…
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Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms, Part 1
Dave Kovic is my favorite modern president. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the real president; President Mitchell was the real president. Xamarin allows us to create mobile applications that appear to be fake applications. But unlike Dave, Xamarin apps are real. Xamarin.Forms allows you to write one application that runs on both iOS and Android. The goal…
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Database Change Control – Executive Summary
We have spent a good amount of time discussing database change control. Why? Why should we care? Why not just let people manually deploy things to SQL? The answer is four-fold: Repeatability Trackability Maintainability Ties application code to the database code Repeatability Ideally, we want the ability to quickly rebuild our environments. We want a…
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DPL Education – Adding Product Search
Search is an essential part of any e-commerce application. If you don’t believe me, go to amazon.com. How hard is it to find the search box? Pretty easy, right? If search is essential, we need to make it work pretty well in our applications. Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the…
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5 Security Resources for Developers
Here’s a list of great security tools, many of the open source, that came out of the April 11th Vogon Poetry Security Open Forum. H/T to Jason Wilkinson of Firespring for helping me compile this list. Qualys Labs SSL Server Test – This tests that your servers are configured correctly to support appropriate levels of…
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Getting Started with Swagger API
Years ago, we had something called ASMX web services. While I wouldn’t want to go back to those, they did have some advantages over the current way many APIs are created. Back in the ASMX days, you got a pretty well-defined contract for interacting with web services. Today if someone is setting up a Web…
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Apple: Make MacBooks Great Again
Dear Apple, I love my 2014 MacBook Pro. It has been a rock-solid development machine, especially when I’m building mobile apps. You’ve made it pretty rough to do iOS development on anything else, but I can let that slide because your hardware is sooo good. But as computers often do, mine is beginning to slow…
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Top Ten Signs You’re Doing Software Development Wrong
#10 – The build server always has a few failing tests Unit tests are a valuable piece to a layered approach to quality. But unit tests only have value if people see them as needing to always pass. The moment people stop caring about failing unit tests, they have lost their value. #9 –…
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