Latest stories

How to Run a Retrospective

Leadership Strategy

One of the things I enjoy doing is running retrospectives. I know, I’m a bit weird. No one likes meetings. Well, this is one important meeting in agile. Why? Because a retrospective allows your team to reflect on the last sprint and make changes. These can be any changes: process, code, metrics etc. With these […]

How to Decide Which Packages to Use

Strategy

At my current company (Agoda), we don’t have a strategy for picking what packages that we use (that I know of). Mostly, you have to prove that installing this package is useful and that it wouldn’t make sense doing it ourselves. We don’t want packages that will increase our bundle size (for javascript) as that […]

Using Swagger to Auto Generate Your JSON Objects

Coding

The title is a lie. You need Swagger to be able to generate your JSON objects, but it’s not what will generate your objects. At Agoda, we use autorest, but our package (autorest) to generate our API calls. That’s because we wanted to use a library called SuperAgent in our client-side code. This generates our API […]

Learning the Language

Leadership

I’ve lived in two countries outside of my homeland, and in both instances, I have taken the initiative to learn the language. Now, you might think: You’re a software developer, you don’t need to learn the local language. And that’s true. In both cases, I was hired to speak English. In both cases, you can […]

Git Branching Strategies – What Works and What Doesn’t

Strategy

I’ve been in several different companies now, and each of them has had different ideas on what the ideal branching method is. There is no one perfect branching strategy for your company/product. You can probably get any strategy to work with your team if you want. Today, I’m going to introduce you to a few […]

Improving Execution and Monitoring Execution

Leadership

One of the things I ended up being tasked with as the “leader” of the team, was monitoring our progress. One of our KPIs was to improve our execution. How do you monitor or even improve your execution as a team? That was one of the things we asked ourselves, and we started our journey […]

Using React-Redux-Forms

Coding

The main reason you could say we moved to Redux was validation. We didn’t want to add a whole lot of code to our page components to validate every child component. In some components, we had up to ten fields, and all of them had to be validated. Can you imagine the size of the […]

Migrating to React-Redux

Coding

You don’t need Redux Repeat after me, “I don’t need Redux”. Seriously, you probably don’t. We didn’t need Redux in our SPA until we started adding more complicated forms with complicated validation. You can easily get away writing a React SPA without Redux. The state can be managed at a page level (or higher if you […]

Jest, React, and Mocking

Coding

Are you stuck with Proxyquire or Sinon? Before we moved to Jest, we used Karma with Mocha/Chai. These come with no built-in mocking capabilities (as far as I’m aware). If you’re a C# developer, you know all about the different Mock frameworks (e.g. Moq), and you want to be able to do the same with […]

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