continuous integration Travis CI and you. Software projects are an iterative process. Tests, linting, and even deployment should occur at every step of that iteration. One can make such tasks much easier with task runners like Grunt or Gulp, but the burden of remembering to do it still lies on
beginner's path Environment variables. Environment variables are essential in practically any web app. If you ever use an API where they give you unique credentials, you need them. If you want automation of any kind, you need them. If you want to be able to deploy your app
vulnerability Dealing with failure. Two weeks ago, I failed. It was not the light-weight kind of failure: the "oops, my bad, let's fix it, no big deal." This failure was not the difference between 70% complete and 95% complete. This failure was the kind that crippled
beginner's path Beginner's guide to testing with Mocha and Chai. Writing tests in Mocha/Chai can be intimidating to a junior developer. Here are a few steps I used to make that world less scary. For this post, we will focus on the bare minimum to get you testing quickly using the browser. Table
Hack Reactor Upgrading the dev environment at Hack Reactor. Every morning at Hack Reactor, the computers are wiped and restored to default settings. This makes a great deal of sense for the school. They generally provide a clean, happy dev environment. Sadly, the environment does not include classic git shortcuts or the iconic
algorithms Visualizations of Data Structures and Algorithms - Part I Inspired by the capabilities of the D3 library, I have embarked on a project to visualize common data structures and algorithms. So far, I have created demonstrations for bubble sort and quicksort. This post will recount an interesting design challenge I encountered. Table of
beginner's path The art of mentoring. The first week of Hack Reactor has largely been review. (Actually, I expect this to be the case for the first few weeks.) I've taken the opportunity to mentor other students struggling with the material. Yesterday, I used half of my lunch time to