In the article, Why I Recommend Against Using Cucumber, the author Jason Swett, stipulates some problems with how he sees Cucumber being used incorrectly, and that even if used correctly, he posits that Cucumber has a “small negative value.” While people’s testing practice may vary, and there is more than one way to skin a cat, based on our experience using Cucumber at MojoTech on many Ruby projects, I felt the need to offer a rebuttal because Mr.…
These days, it seems that almost everybody wants to learn to code — and if you believe all the boot camps and book titles that have surfaced over the past two decades, you might think it’s also easy to do. It seems to me that the latest generation of programmers is learning to code quite differently from how I learned. Perhaps that’s progress, but on the other hand, I meet many junior programmers who achieve a certain competency with code, but then hit a ceiling.…
Intro to Cloud-Native Terms The definition of what makes something a cloud-native application can be a little (pardon the pun) cloudy. This lack of clarity is curious given that by 2020, it is predicted that the “Cloud Shift” will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending, making cloud computing the next major technological disruptor. With this much money at stake, one would hope that everyone involved in the cloud ecosystem could speak the same language and come to a consensus on the correct usages.…
A lot of projects we work on at MojoTech require the UI to be accessible in many different locales. Recently we have been working with a global retailer to build an internationalized React client for their B2B ordering platform. One of the core requirements was for this to be accessible throughout Europe and the United States. This includes translating strings to different languages, and formatting numbers, dates, and currencies to the user’s preferred locale.…
When you look at an agency’s site, what do you look for? We recently redesigned our website at MojoTech, and we spent a lot of time looking at other agency sites to help us think about how to move forward with ours. This exercise made something painfully clear: most agency websites aren’t particularly helpful to potential clients. They’re built with the agency in mind, rather than the client. For example, many sites spend countless words going on about the various programming languages that they use; a valuable recruiting pitch, perhaps, but not all that interesting to someone who merely wants their idea turned into a working, thriving product.…
Introduction Running A/B tests are pretty straightforward. Pick an A/B testing platform, set up some JavaScript snippets, and start making your changes through the provided editor. It works great for testing copy and small HTML/CSS changes, but what if your tests are more complex? Netlify looks to solve this problem by allowing you to A/B test multiple GitHub branches. You just select the available branch, specify how you want to split the traffic, and you’re ready.…
The Product Manager is an essential player in the software development process. Yet, we often find ourselves answering a troubling question when sitting down with eager prospective clients. “Why do I need a PM? I already know what I want to build.” One aspect of the Product Manager’s role is addressing and finding the perfect balance between building the right product and building the product right. What’s the difference, you say?…
At MojoTech, we care about building great products, but more importantly, we care about building the right products. And building the right product is hard. Because we can only build products based on the best information available to us, discovering better information is required if we want to build a better product. This is why we always try to start off new development projects with a Discovery Phase, in which we take all of the ideas about the product; analyze, research, and test our assumptions; and ruthlessly cut everything that doesn’t apply to our vision.…
Introduction Running applications on the cloud is not a binary decision. You don’t just move to the cloud and call it a day. The journey to cloud-native starts with establishing business decisions that mandate that applications in your organization need to deploy faster, scale easier, and break less frequently. Throughout the cloud journey, companies can find themselves in one of several stages, progressing further into a cloud-native environment. I’ve highlighted these stages below, including the major benefits of each.…
Introduction Many posts aimed at new Vim users tend to just paste a large .vimrc file and then explain a few plugins to try. Very little (if any) time is devoted to explaining what all those settings in .vimrc are actually doing. I’d like to walk through my personal .vimrc file section by section and break down what and why I have the configuration settings I do. Given that my .…
On paper, MojoTech’s resume looks pretty impressive. Since its inception in 2008, MojoTech has launched more than 100 products by partnering with clients to deliver software that solves their most complex business problems. MojoTech was ranked the 42nd fastest growing software company in America by Inc. Magazine, and was listed as one of 2016’s Best Places to Work for the third year running, by Providence Business News, who also awarded co-founder Chris Shoemaker “CTO of the Year”.…