A few weeks ago I spent a week writing implementations of the Bank tech test, to demonstrate high code quality, test driven development process and object oriented design principles. I ended up writing four separate implementations in three languages: Ruby, JavaScript for the browser, Node.js and Python. Let’s compare and…

A couple of weeks ago I graduated from Makers Academy. The bootcamp culminated with a two-week project. Our team created a game to learn VSCode shortcuts. You can play it here! The next cohort are about to start their final projects, so here are some lessons I learned that hopefully…

As I’ve been making little apps, I’ve been thinking about User Experience (UX), User Interfaces (UI), and their implementation, but as I’ve done all three myself I haven’t really had to think too hard about making clear cut lines between them. What is a UX design decision? What’s a UI…

Today’s work on the MySpace revival project was interrupted by an urgent message from our “client”: The business has recently bought a competing social media platform and has made the decision to consolidate the platforms - but keep the look and identity of each site. The decision reached is to…

You’re probably familiar with Google, and other search engines, and have used these powerful tools to look for probably literally anything you want to find out, even just to check how to spell something (I checked how to spell Lamborghini just now). But there’s a lot more that Google and…

JavaScript isn’t very good at multi tasking, it can only do one thing at a time. But, you can tell it to put something aside for later and do something else in the meantime, with asynchronous functions. To illustrate this concept, it is time for another contrived, kitchen related (see…

Recently I’ve been developing small web apps in Ruby, using Sinatra as a back end, testing with RSpec and Capybara. This has gone well, however I have noticed that there are certain scenarios in which Sinatra’s helpful 404 and 500 error pages can cause false positives in your tests. An (incredibly contrived) example Let’s…

Let’s learn a little bit about Object Oriented Programming! Dependency injection, polymorphism, and forwarding. I’m using GitHub gists for these example to try it out. Let’s say we had some Ruby code for a Journey class that let’s us pass in a destination, and start and finish the journey, returning…

Week 1 of the Makers programming academy has been all about Test Driven Development and Object Oriented Programming. And what better to show that off with a toaster app. What is Test Driven Development? TDD is a process by which requirements for a program inform tests that test those requirements. In order to pass a…