Every Year Advent of Code releases a holiday themed series of programming puzzles, unlocked in small bundles from December 1st through 25th. While I've been aware of the challenge in the past, this was my first year digging in to the puzzles in earnest.

Advent of Code 2019, The Intcode Problems

MojoTech has taken over ownership of the Elixir Torch open source software project and released version 2.0 to the public.

Carrying the Torch

Today I’m officially announcing the launch of Prismatest, a Javascript library to decouple your front-end tests from the view layer details, promoting tests that are easier to check for correctness and easier to maintain.

Introducting Prismatest Testing Library

Introducing Prismatest Testing Library

There once was a professor who ran a school for gifted youngsters. He had the unfortunate problem that his teachers would frequently disappear...

Contexts with Some Light Phoenix

Since one of its earliest releases, I have been a rabid fan of an indie computer game called Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP).

Opening Day

See how you can create a simple in-memory cache to reduce network requests and boost performance.

How To Build A Simple In-Memory Cache in Node.js

Build a simple in-memory cache in Node.js

The Real Value of Cucumber

These days, it seems that almost everybody wants to learn to code -- it seems that everybody thinks it's also easy to do.

Learning to Code: You’re Doing It Wrong

Use our simplified guide to learn the latest terms & trends around Cloud-Native and Cloud Computing terms.

Cloud Computing Terminology Made Simple

A Complete Guide to Cloud Computing Terms

What is the difference between building the right product and building the product right? Let’s take a look at the parts that make up this process.

Building the Right Product vs. Building the Product Right

Dissecting the Cloud-Native Maturity Model from on-premise applications, through 100% native applications.

Cloud-Native Maturity Model (w/ Infographic)

Cloud-Native Maturity Model

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 .vimrc has over 15 years’ worth of built-up cruft, this will also be a good exercise for me to clean it up a bit and update where needed as well.

Vimrc Tutorial for Advanced Users (With Examples) | MojoTech Blog

A Veterans Tutorial of Vim

Functional programming is all about building up complicated solutions from small, easy to understand parts.

6 Tips For Functional Programming | MojoTech

6 Tips For Functional Programming

TypeScript Generics provides nice facilities for quick and easy error detection when writing React components.


TypeScript - Leveraging Generics for React Components

TypeScript Generics for React Components

How Elixir's Ecto Promotes Well-Designed Applications

Magit is the holy grail of workspace tools, allowing Git users to handle all aspects of source control directly from within Emacs. 

Magit: A Git Porcelain inside Emacs

Why You Should Use Magit: A Git Porcelain Inside Emacs

Will Cohen graduated from UMASS Boston with a BS in Computer Science and has a background in building software for healthcare organizations. 

Will Cohen | MojoTech

Meet Will Cohen

As consultants at MojoTech, our job is not only to deliver great software products but to make the client-consultant experience enjoyable.

How to become a better software consultant | MojoTech

How to Be a Better Software Consultant

Meet Jordan - our newest employee at MojoTech.

Meet Jordan

Meet Chris - our newest employee at MojoTech. Chris attended Providence College and Brandeis University to study the fine art of talking to computers.

New Mojo: Meet Chris Kudarauskas

Meet Chris

We're giving our readers a "peek behind the curtain" of our Git Workflow Best Practices and the ins-and-outs of our engineering practices at MojoTech.

Git Workflow Practices | MojoTech

MojoTech Git Workflow

Meet Gerald - our newest employee at MojoTech.

Meet Gerald

Meet Vivian - our newest employee at MojoTech.

Meet Vivian

It's no secret that we here at MojoTech are big advocates of Elixir. We're using it on client projects, talking about it at conferences, and we're even involved in an incredible conference this fall, Elixir with Love.

Elixir Toolkit

Here at MojoTech, we're React enthusiasts, so we rounded up our favorite links and resources to share.

React Toolkit

Clutch recently spoke with Will Farrell, Lead Software Architect at MojoTech, about cloud infrastructure options and various cloud solution options.

Cloud Infrastructure Options

If you’re an engineer at a digital product company or agency, you’re probably no stranger to the principles of the agile method. You know that...

Avoiding Blockers: Sketch for Developers

Specifying Specifications

In software, that understanding — between designers, engineers, product managers, and especially clients — is just as essential.

Speaking the Product Language

Meet Jeff Cole!

REST for the Weary

Meet Channing

As one of the "elder statesmen" at MojoTech, I interview a lot of engineers. Over the years, I've come to see this more and more as a discipline in itself.

Conducting Technical Interviews:  The Human Factors

Elias obtained his CS degree from Grinnell College, a tiny little school in Iowa. He initially intended on majoring in physics but realized that he didn’t find physics jokes funny.

Meet Elias

Writing and maintaining a useful test suite can be difficult. Today I’ll discuss some common causes of bad tests, and how to fix them.

Why Your Tests are Broken and How to Fix Them

The operations of our Elixir processes are uniquely suited to a visual representation that illustrates the operating network that our application will create.

The Elixir way: Operational Reasoning

Message Queues in a Microservices World

Safeguard Web Service Failures in Elixir with Fuse.

Safeguard Web Service Failures in Elixir with Fuse

Anybody writing software that has to work in more than one geographic area must at some point think about how to handle time zones. Many developers have an incomplete picture of how time zones work, and this post is written in an attempt to describe this convoluted area.

The Complexity of Time Data Programming | MojoTech Blog

The Complexity of Time Data Programming

There’s not much documentation out there related to forwarding React Native JS error messages to reporting services. We've come up with a solution.

Fabric Integration for React Native on Android

After a career spent working almost entirely with SQL-based relational databases, in the past year or so I've gotten the chance to use Datomic.

Datomic, the new Sequel to SQL?

Is Datomic the Sequel to SQL?

Origins of a Senior Engineer

A few of us at MojoTech recently attended the 2016 React Europe conference in Paris. It was a great opportunity to hear from developers around the world 

React Europe, A look back

A Look Back at React Europe

Announcing StandupHub Beta: Making Tomorrow's Standup Meeting a Whole Lot Easier.

There are many options for code quality tools, some more controversial than others. One such option is ESLint in JavaScript with the consistent-return rule.

Consistent Return Rule - JavaScript ESLint | MojoTech

The Must-See Presentations at RailsConf 2016

One of the fastest-changing areas in web development is front-end JavaScript frameworks. Here's why we picked React/Reflux, and how we made it work for us.

React JS and Reflux in 5 Minutes | MojoTech

React and Reflux in 5 minutes

It's Never One Loose Screw

The Perils of Rewrites

Filling the Engineering Skills Gap

Multidimensional learning for success

Constrained by time while building a mobile application for both Android & iOS devices, I decided to implement the applications using React Native.

From React to React Native in 5 minutes

One of the selling points of React is that the framework allows you to convert UI components into React as needed.

React and Redux a la carte

And the "CTO of the Year" award goes to...

One of Clojure's treasures is the sophisticated support for destructuring. To explain its support for destructuring function arguments, we need a good example.

How destructuring saved the Empire

As a MojoTech project lead my morning and afternoon look the same, so to avoid redundancies, we’ll take a look at a typical morning schedule.

A day in the life of a MojoTech Project Lead

Imagine for a moment that DogWalker is a real application.  We’ve analyzed the business model, and are expecting High Usership in the future.  To reduce server loads and deliver a snappy user experience we plan on using a JavaScript front end.  Since we want to add JavaScript components over time, we’re going to use the React JS library.

How to use a React DateTimePicker with Rails forms

Here at MojoTech, we are lucky to have several engineers who have used Ruby on Rails from very early on in its history.

A Decade of Rails

At the end of each year, we like to thank our clients for the opportunities we’ve had to produce awesome work, grow as individuals, and as a company.

Shipping and building, into the New Year

In a healthy software project, a line is drawn between the Application itself and its Configuration.  For good reason, we treat each component differently.

Configuration as Code, when is it a good idea?

When is "Code as Configuration" a good idea?

Tim joins us from *The Providence Journal* where he worked as a staff photographer, technology columnist, energy and utilities writer, and most recently as a developer on the Journal's website.

Meet Tim!

Healthy projects ship on time and work as expected, and they are built by empowered teams who respond quickly to changes. 

Shipping Healthy Software Projects

What do healthy software projects have in common?

Developers are asked to take a problem specified in the fuzzy language of human interaction & translate it in a way that can be understood by a machine.

Static guarantees.

Understanding technical debt and discretionary spending.

Understanding technical debt and discretionary spending

Here at MojoTech we have routine “code challenge” exercises that are given to the team to keep their 'set of tools' sharp.

Why we have routine "code challenges".

Code clarity makes projects easier to work on for all levels of developers by being as close to self documenting as possible.

Optimizing your code for clarity.

How Much Time Should an Engineer be Devoting to Feature Implementation?

In my previous article, we discussed how we should write living documentation. Now, we’ll explore how we can write the code underlying the documentation.

How You Can Implement Living Documentation (Part 3 in a Series)

Do you need a Programmer or an Engineer?

MojoTech Developer David Leal discusses some reasons that should help you to at least consider writing living documentation. (The Why.)

Why You Should Write Living Documentation

Aaron Snyder recently figured out a way to do some integration testing with Google Maps Markers. He shares it here.

Selecting Google Maps V3 Markers with Selenium or jQuery

Starting up a Marionette.js App with routing can be tricky and full of gotchas. Here is a jump start guide to get you going.

Marionette Application JS Tutorial 

Kicking off a Marionette.js application

Nesting views can be difficult. Marionette makes your life easy with an elegant view layer that simplifies complexity and hides the implementation details.

Nested Views in Backbone.Marionette

Skip the CSS mess and create a JavasScript responsive sticky footer in a few lines of code.

Responsive jQuery Sticky Footers Made Easy

Responsive Dynamic-Height Sticky Footers

UPDATE: Jeet has been nominated as a prestigious Awwward candidate. If you like the site, and you support the cause, we’d appreciate your vote.

Jeet | A Grid System Made for Humans

Jeet | A grid system for humans

Fundamentals: An introduction to forEach, map and reduce.

DRY up your Views in Backbone Marionette

First of all, don’t panic. This can be fixed easily or relatively easily! However, let’s get this out of the way...

What to do when you’ve ruined origin/master

Learn how to build more performant web applications by optimizing slow collectionViews.

Marrionette JS collectionView Optimization  - A Refresher Guide

Interactive Git Rebase for Fun and Profit

Think Small

Algorithmic Interviewing (Optimizing to Hire the Wrong Developer)

Try This Simple Hack For Testing New Features Before You Build Them

Try This Simple Hack To Test New Features Before You Build Them

Do not rely on the quick fix that modals are – don’t be lazy.

Modals are lazy

Introducing Backbone.RouterFilters

The time has come for Rubyists in general and Rails in particular to embrace Ruby’s Lisp heritage and ditch YAML as a configuration default for database. Code is Data/Data is Code. There are a host of reasons why Ruby is great for configuration and only a few in favor of YAML. Let’s look at why we use YAML in the Ruby community...

Turtles All the Way Down

Whenever you write code, you hold certain assumptions in your mind. But sometimes your code fails to convey those assumptions. Consider this snippet...

Code With Clarity

The One Thing You Need To Know About Bang Methods

Retina ready adaptive svgs for IE8 +

Introducing Batchelor

Easy FAQs with I18n

At MojoTech, we spend lots of time evaluating code quality. Like evaluating a diamond, the evaluation of code requires the consideration of multiple attributes.

The 4Cs: A Code Review Mnemonic

Resque is a great library for creating background jobs. Learn how to query these workers and see what's going on under the hood.

Resque Background Jobs - A Redis Library | MojoTech

In ruby, all method invocations are expressions. That is, they have a value—same in CoffeeScript. Other languages have things similar to function...

A Fireside Chat About Optional Parentheses In Ruby

A Fireside Chat About Optional Parentheses

Modding Out Bob

Make Node.js PUT or POST requests compatible with Rails

I didn’t know much about file encodings prior to this week. I opened a file in Ruby for reading, or writing and the encoding defaulted to UTF-8. I was happily ignorant about directly interfacing with this layer of data storage.