Topic

Developer Experience

A collection of 21 issues

A Great Developer Experience Translates To Better Products

You don't need to set up your development environment. We have dedicated machines running Visual Studio. Just remote desktop in. It was the first day of my new job as an engineer. All excited, I wanted to set up my development environment. My excitement dropped immediately. It highlights

We just throw people at the problem until it goes away

I was astonished when I reviewed the CI process of a promising scale-up with a complex technological product and found these instant red flags: * GitHub actions that hadn't run for two years * A testing suite with more tests failing than succeeding * A passing build despite the failing test

Creating an iOS 14 widget showing health data

With iOS 14 Apple introduced a neat new feature: widgets. I've been running the beta for some weeks now and love them. So let's see how hard it is to create one ourself. Let's start with a little disclaimer: This article and the code

Installing a node.js application as a Windows service

It wasn't my intention when I started the first article but this has become a series of how to run node applications in production with IIS on Windows. These are the previous articles on the topic: * Hosting a Node.js application on Windows with IIS as reverse proxy

Using HTTP platform handler to host a node.js application via IIS

About a year ago I wrote about hosting a Node.js application via IIS. It uses IIS as a reversed proxy to route traffic from IIS to the node.js webserver. To manage the node.js process pm2 was used. Unfortunately I had some problems restarting the pm2 process when

Connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server database on macOS using Python

There are always situations where I want to automate small tasks. I like using Python for these kind of things, you can quickly get something working without much hassle. I needed to perform some database changes in a Microsoft SQL Server database and wanted to connect to it using Python.

Testing request permissions in an Android application

While working on an Android application I wanted to test permission requests. This application needed the location permission, typically this is code that is written once and when it is marked as done never looked at again. I wanted to create some UI tests to ensure that everything works and

Hosting a Node.js application on Windows with IIS as reverse proxy

Unfortunately a lot of companies are still stuck with Windows servers. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft, right. As a developer this can be frustrating because choosing a server technology is usually limited to ASP.Net. I have experimented with hosting Node.js applications on a Windows server by

Configuring aliases in iTerm on Mac and Cmder on Windows in Parallels

Aliases are a handy way to quickly execute certain commands in the terminal on Mac and in the command prompt on Windows. I recently read this post about git aliases which nicely demonstrates what is possible, it focuses on git commands but it can be done for any type of

Improve Visual Studio Performance By Disabling Automatic File Restore

This excellent tip comes from my coworker Konstantin. If you have a Visual Studio solution that has a lot of projects and is slow you can speed up Visual Studio by disabling automatic file restore. To disable automatic file restore open Tools > Options in Visual Studio, select Projects and