Tech debt demotivates and can kill your pet projects

I’ve been working on a side project named My Assets (Meus Ativos in Portuguese), this is what I learnt about tech debt.

Setup Integration Tests with Capybara

This is a tutorial to setup an entire integration test project based on selenium, capybara and phantomjs. This is a purely black box text, so no matter the language you used on your website it should be helpful.

Using BASH and Git to track your environment growth

The other day I noticed that my test suite was taking over 30 seconds to run. It bothered me and got me thinking “It wasn’t like this…” so I decided to dig in and I realized that there were several small issues that were slowing it down. The fix was straight foward and in the end it was running in 10 seconds (yay!), but I was still concerned with the question: “How it got this bad and no one have noticed?”

This is related to peripheral view, slightly changes on our environment doesn’t come to our attention. Mostly because it’s not our main goal neither we track them, so it changes we don’t notice until it’s that bad.

The solution is to keep track of data and manage its growth.

ReactJS for dummies

After almost two years working with AngularJS a new project came to me with few presentation rules but high performance was requires. So I took a look again on the frameworks around and decided to give a try for ReactJS. Here are my thoughts about it so far, and some quick explanation for those who never saw it before.

Understanding Promises

Promise is an specification to handle async calls. There are several ways to solve this problem a very popular solution is using callback arguments. In this article I will introduce promises and do a shallow comparison of both solutions.

The Goal - Theory of constraints

The book tells a story about a factory manager that has an incredibly short deadline of three months to transform the site from a negative ballance and low customer satisfaction into profitable. Meanwhile he has some issues at home with wife and kids and meet an old professor that end up coaching him in the process of change.

The concepts of the theory of constraints are introduced naturally throughout the book as the story goes on, here are my highlights.

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

This is a best seller and a must read for people who wants to improve their soft skills, better approach and understand people in a vast different scenarios. Here are my notes taken by chapter.