Recently, I used AI coding tools (Cursor), leading to some crucial reflections for all of us leading engineering teams.

1. Introduction & Overview In this tutorial, we will be going through how to integrate the email marketing platform Mailchimp with Next.js and TypeScript. When integrating it into an application recently, I ran across numerous issues and thought this tutorial might be useful to others. A GitHub repository is referenced at the end of this tutorial.  Prerequisites For your reference, below are the versions we are using in this application. We will be using the app router setup for Next.js. Ver

Many organizations are pursuing a headless strategy for enterprise content management. A common term to describe this approach is MACH: microservices, API-first, cloud, headless. This architecture consists of many services, deployed in the cloud, communicating and producing data via APIs. In MACH architectures, it's good practice to have an integration layer to synthesize these sources of data before providing it to a front-end. CMS content is a common integration point, as it's close to the fr

How can we have a stylized and easily readable UI from ChatGPT? What we originally thought was simple turned out to be more challenging.

Discover a solution to the challenge of maintaining up-to-date documentation, by creating diagrams using code. This approach makes it easier for engineers to create and update documentation, and helps new team members develop mental models based on accurate information.

These are my six picks of lessons learned and challenges we overcame from a recent software project. As Mike Tyson once said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

So you need to introduce some dynamic components to your MPA code-base. What should you do? This article aims to discuss different scenarios and how they can be handled.

"Front-end" in web development refers to the visual appearance of an application or website. In Django, a web development framework, the front-end is created in DTL (Django Template Language), which is a superset of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). DTL represents the "what" of the page - the actual contents. The "how" of the page - how the page appears - is defined by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Django template language (DTL) files Here's an example of a DTL file: stats-pane.html {% lo

We decided to give Prisma a try recently to see how well it performed. Prisma impressed us with its developer experience (DX) and abstractions. Yet, we encountered challenges and performance issues. It even forced us to shape the database schema based on its limitations.

Prop Drilling is the act of passing data, in this case, react props, through several nested layers of components before it reaches the component that needs the data. Is this a problem in and of itself? It depends (which is the best answer for a question). Props are part of the “React way” of managing state, so using them, even passing them through nested components, isn’t necessarily bad. It depends on the scale. For small applications, this is not an issue. You can use either of the approache

You have a third-party provider that you need to obtain news information from and the only API they have for this is a POST with a request body, yet this clearly should be a GET process since the API is simply retrieving data and nothing transactional is happening.

Through each of these sections, we’ll focus on various design principles, with particular attention to the five SOLID principles, which will be illustrated through examples.

How we bridged Backend with Frontend by converting template syntax and how AI helped. What is templating? In web templating, a template acts as a blueprint or a skeleton for the web page. It contains the static parts of the page layout and defines placeholders or variables where dynamic content can be inserted. I believe every developer is familiar with it, as it comes from the ‘ancient’ web development times and has been around for decades. The ISML templating ISML stands for “Intershop

Learn how Jetpack Compose makes creating custom shapes in your UI with some basic trigonometry.

This article outlines a strategy for migrating content from a traditional CMS to a Headless CMS, focusing on HTML-to-rich-text conversion challenges. It suggests migrating raw HTML and applying scoped CSS during rendering for old articles, allowing gradual updates to maintain content integrity.

Are your Docker builds slow in GitHub Actions? Here's how to speed it up with the built-in GitHub Actions cache.

Get started and apply some general C# coding best practices to help you create something that’s scalable from the very beginning and minimizes spaghetti code.

In this article, I detail the benefits of using Terragrunt. At the end, I list the reasons why sometimes Terragrunt may not be the right choice for your project.

Using Emotion the way they don't tell you to.

At a high level, micro-frontends are a software development approach that breaks down a monolithic frontend application into smaller, individual mini applications.

See how I attempted to revolutionize our Tier 1 NetSuite support using ChatGPT.

Your site has gone down. Users are contacting you for support, but you have no idea what could be causing the issue. Mild panic sets in. This scenario is all too common, and recently, I also encountered this issue. It turned out that the problem was not in the code I had recently written; but in my failure to realize the software development kit (SDK) I was using was deprecated. This article will explore the risks of using an outdated SDK and provide tips to avoid its pitfalls. So, what exa

This blog post explores a memory leak caused by Emotion, Chakra-UI, SSR, and dynamic props in web development. It covers their significance, impact, detective work, solution, and impressive results.

What’s the buzz all about Composable Architecture? Isn’t that just microservices?

Automated web accessibility testing tools can help you find and fix accessibility issues in your website, ensuring that it's accessible to everyone. In this guide, we'll explore some popular tools for automated web accessibility testing.

I built a game in JavaScript. Here's how I did it.

In this post, I'm going to outline some good practices I've learned along the way and (hopefully) convince you why you should consider using a logging framework immediately instead of console.log statements.

How to get Ruby on Rails working with PostGIS and PostgreSQL on Fly.io

NeMo is a toolkit provided by NVIDIA that allows you to use modules (reusable components) for a variety of AI tasks. Components like encoders, decoders, loss functions and more.

Very soon Fly will become a contender to fully replace Heroku and will be much more simple and easy to use than something like Kubernetes or any of AWS's offerings. Right now, it's great for hobbyists or a team with one or two developers.

We've updated and open-sourced Terraform scripts to bootstrap your own Mastodon server using AWS, Elastic Container Service and Fargate.

The what could be described as a cross-platform solution for mobile development. But, there is a big difference between a cross-platform solution and Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile.

Building full-stack monorepo's doesn't have to be a headache. With the T3 stack we can quickly spin up full-stack, typesafe Next.js projects.

What if you could catch badly performing queries during your local development process? The Spring Boot SQL Explain library does this for you.

Unit tests for APIs can sometimes provide little to no value, so the next logical step is often to write integration tests. You don’t want to touch live data though, and want tests to make assertions against actual (un-mocked) service logic. The following is an approach to do just that.

The goal of risk management is to minimize risk in a technical project by minimizing the probability of failure and minimizing the impact of failure.

Templates may use configurations adding up unnecessary expenses. Here's my journey to move away from this config to reduce this project's AWS cost.

How do you integrate data models in a source control repository into a database, using a CI/CD process?

We talk about Microsoft's dependency injection package TSyringe and its different dependency scopes. We explain how to use resolution scoped dependencies over transient, singleton, and container scoped dependencies to limit the scope of a dependency to a single lambda invocation.

Know Your Customer (KYC) is an integral part of any Anti-Money Laundering program. In this article I'll go through what KYC is, why you may need it, and how to choose a SaaS provider that fits your needs.

AWS tags are key-value labels you can assign to AWS resources that give extra information about it.

There is a better way.

“Is the data ready?” Or more accurately, “Can I be confident that this data is correct?”

Many seem to think that the only proper way to create a phone app is by engineering it natively. In this post, I break down why React Native is a great way to build an app.

Migrations allow us to describe how to adjust the data model of an existing database. They make a scripted, surgical change to a database rather than replacing it entirely and blowing away any content changes.

We recently completed a project with one of the largest affiliate marketing consulting firms in the US which turned out to be a great success for everyone involved. We asked one of the lead consultants on the project, Jason Lombardo, to answer a few questions.

2020 was a hell of a year: A global pandemic, a fraught US election, and ... Microservices! 😬

Here are some things that might be useful for someone else who has experience with RX and starts using LiveData for the first time.

Nowadays just about everyone, everywhere, regardless of age and ability, uses a smartphone. With that in mind, it’s more important than ever to consider all the different ways to make your app accessible to everyone to ensure an inclusive experience. In this series, we’ll be discussing different ways iOS developers can make their apps more accessible. First up, we’ll be talking about Dynamic Type. Dynamic Type is a feature on iOS that enables the app’s content to scale based on the user's pre

This tutorial will describe how to... install Rust, create a new project and manage dependencies, Set up a simple web server, and compile the app and deploy to a virtual server. I'll be working on Ubuntu 20.04 but most of the setup should be the same on macOS or a different flavor of Linux.

Uploading files to S3 directly from the browser is a great way to increase performance by removing the need to process and then re-upload files from your own server.

In this post, we'll define GitOps, review a sample Terraform app module repo and an associated GitHub Workflow to lint and version the module repo, and review a sample Terragrunt live repo and a GitHub Workflow to apply infrastructure changes.

Recently, we've used a few of AWS's services to create full integration and delivery solutions. In this post we'll look at how we've used AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline to create a cost effective, performant and code driven end-to-end CI/CD solution.

Our mobile devices and the apps that run on them have a unique insight into our lives. We use them for communication, entertainment, shopping, photography, navigation, and myriad other purposes. Consequently, apps have access to a great deal of information about our preferences, our contacts, where we go, what we buy, and who we are. As app developers, we need to be cognizant of the information being handled by our apps and to safeguard it accordingly. The protection of sensitive information is

The following presentation was transcribed from “SQL and Python for Product Managers” webinar, presented by Colorado Product Meetup and senior software engineer, Brian Schiller. It has been edited for clarity.

The following article was created from a 2021 CppCon talk given by Jonah Jolley. One of our clients has a software product that must comply with federal regulations. For them, they must submit technical documents to a governing body. However, in their case, the codebase didn’t accurately reflect what was documented. This led to an unmitigated, unsafe condition. To solve this issue, we used Clang LibASTMatchers to check the codebase and ensure they were indeed compliant. Why Compliance in Cod

To help others as they make their way through this process, we decided to document and release our findings as a FreeRTOS tutorial for developers. Here is how to get started with ESP32 on Linux.

AWS tags are key-value labels you can assign to AWS resources that give extra information about it.

Docker is a helpful tool for both developers and ops. It can simplify both the development of an application as well as deployment and management of it. In this post we are going to explore a common pitfall related to developing an application in Docker on the Mac and see what we can do to mitigate the issue and work as productively as possible. Developing in Docker Developing in Docker has a number of advantages over developing directly on your Mac. Before we begin, let’s remind ourselves of

The challenges discussed in this entry are specifically relevant to individuals that have roles in design leadership, product ownership, and user interface design.

In this post, we’ll be comparing C++ with Rust, sharing our thoughts on when you should use each language, and predicting the future of C++ vs Rust.

Properly configuring and tuning your Airflow deployment to be generally performant can be a nontrivial endeavor. You can easily shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t do it right at first. You’ll discover and experience sporadic bottlenecks in Airflow-wide and DAG-level execution. You’ll apply solutions to those as they arise. You run the risk of developing a fragmented and mystical understanding of Airflow’s goings-on. You’ll have many questions and, frustratingly, fewer answers. Why are more

Learn how Github Codespaces can make deploys with Terraform secure, reliable, and hassle free.