The True Cost Of A Quickfix
Picture this, a sprint is underway, development is running smoothly, then QA reports a rather odd bug, you begin to investigate and lo and behold you find the following comment:
Writing Rust NIFs for Elixir With Rustler
A Native Implemented Function is implemented in C (or Rust when using Rustler) and can be called from Elixir or Erlang just like any other function. It's the simplest and fastest way to run native code from Erlang but it does come with a caveat: a crash in a NIF can bring down the whole BEAM. This makes Rust a safer option than C for implementing NIFs as its type system and ownership model guarantee memory and thread-safety.
Failing (and winning) at planning software projects
Scoping and planning software projects of any kind is a challenging task that many teams struggle with. The negative consequences of mis-planning are manyfold – teams are unable to give reliable estimates, synchronize dependent activities (e.g. marketing) with the project's progress or maintain a high level of quality that will allow maintaining and evolving an application over the long term. In this post, I will analyse these typical problems in some detail and present techniques to address and overcome them, reducing uncertainty, risk and frustration.
The state of PWA support on mobile and desktop in 2020
Progressive Web Apps have evolved rapidly over the past few years and are now supported better than ever. In the past 2 years, Microsoft and Samsung have joined Google in the quest to actively support and promote PWAs. Since early 2020, Apple seems to have realized that not all apps belong in the App Store. With the release of iOS 13, most basic PWA features are now finally fully supported on iPads and iPhones.
How to improve the accessibility of your existing Ember app
Making sure your web app is accessible can be a daunting task. Just as having a good testing suite or an app that's responsive and works well across devices, it seems easier to achieve when you're starting a new project than when working with an existing app. Knowing where to start can be tough, therefore we've outlined how to implement accessibility tests in Ember alongside a very common case: forms.
How to Improve Kick-off Meetings to Spark Collaboration
Could some adjustments to kick-off meetings lead to a more streamlined and efficient collaboration?
Porting a site to Ember using Percy
This article details a technique where the visual testing software Percy was used to port the old Ember Guides to an entirely different technology, without anybody noticing.
The little changes that helped to transform an RFC into emberjs.com
The new landing page for Ember.js is a big project.
How to over-engineer a static page
When we set out to rebuild our own website simplabs.com in 2019, we wanted to use that project as an opportunity to ignore all economic considerations (and reason you could say) and dive deep into what was technically possible. Doing so would allow us to build something that was super customized for our specific needs and highly optimized for performance. We ended up spending a lot of time and effort but are quite pleased with the result.
Bringing clarity to templates through Ember Octane
When reading Ember templates, have you ever wondered where a certain dynamic value comes from? Is that dynamic value a property of the component, a named argument that was passed in, or even a helper?
Why Companies Invest In Open-Source and Why Yours Should, Too
Less productivity, missed project deadlines and wasted money: that’s what you get for letting your developers work on open-source projects. Or do you really?
simplabs monthly update - July 2019
Welcome to the fourth installment of our monthly update. This one is later than expected but still packed with all the events and activities that have been happening at simplabs along with the things we're looking forward to. Enjoy.