Blog

Calling all tech founders: we are seeking startups for pro-bono product design!

We want to give back to our community by sharing our knowledge and expertise with a founder from an underrepresented diversity group in tech, so they can successfully grow and evolve their digital product.

Bringing the Matrix Protocol to Elixir

Matrix is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted, real-time, open standard communication protocol designed to protect people's privacy. The technology has applications not only in messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) but similarly in Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).

Simpler and more powerful components in Ember Octane with Glimmer Components

Following up on Bringing clarity to templates through Ember Octane, we will be discussing how the Glimmer components introduced by the Ember Octane edition aim to modernize and simplify Ember applications by using native JavaScript syntax and an HTML-first approach.

Testing your Mirage.js setup

Mirage.js is a universal library to mock out HTTP-based APIs. It has proven quite useful to us in several client projects, where it helped us write a lot of acceptance tests in a concise, but flexible manner.

The issue with tools like this is that you are not testing "the real API" though. This is where end-to-end tests are useful, but since those kinds of tests are quite slow and complex it would be quite costly to use them for all the kinds of tests in a modern web application.

One solution to some of the challenges of using a mock API is to test it and make sure it matches what you would expect from your real API. In this blog post we will show you how we started writing tests for our Mirage.js setup and why it might be useful for you too.

The True Cost Of A Quickfix

Picture this, a sprint is underway, development is running smoothly, then QA reports a rather odd bug, you begin to investigate and lo and behold you find the following comment:

// Dear programmer:
// When I wrote this code, only god and I knew how it worked
// Now, only god knows

Writing Rust NIFs for Elixir With Rustler

A Native Implemented Function is implemented in C (or Rust when using Rustler) and can be called from Elixir or Erlang just like any other function. It's the simplest and fastest way to run native code from Erlang but it does come with a caveat: a crash in a NIF can bring down the whole BEAM. This makes Rust a safer option than C for implementing NIFs as its type system and ownership model guarantee memory and thread-safety.

Failing (and winning) at planning software projects

Scoping and planning software projects of any kind is a challenging task that many teams struggle with. The negative consequences of mis-planning are manyfold – teams are unable to give reliable estimates, synchronize dependent activities (e.g. marketing) with the project's progress or maintain a high level of quality that will allow maintaining and evolving an application over the long term. In this post, I will analyse these typical problems in some detail and present techniques to address and overcome them, reducing uncertainty, risk and frustration.

The state of PWA support on mobile and desktop in 2020

Progressive Web Apps have evolved rapidly over the past few years and are now supported better than ever. In the past 2 years, Microsoft and Samsung have joined Google in the quest to actively support and promote PWAs. Since early 2020, Apple seems to have realized that not all apps belong in the App Store. With the release of iOS 13, most basic PWA features are now finally fully supported on iPads and iPhones.

There are still limitations for some operating systems (OS) and browsers, so when you are considering building a PWA it is important to take this in mind. That's why we made this overview.

How to improve the accessibility of your existing Ember app

Making sure your web app is accessible can be a daunting task. Just as having a good testing suite or an app that's responsive and works well across devices, it seems easier to achieve when you're starting a new project than when working with an existing app. Knowing where to start can be tough, therefore we've outlined how to implement accessibility tests in Ember alongside a very common case: forms.