5 Steps to greater UX

UX — what’s it all about? Let’s imagine — you have launched your product and are quite happy with it. And then suddenly you hear everyone talk about UX, which gets you…

Creating slugs for Ecto schemas

What is a slug? The term “slug” comes from the world of newspaper production. If you have ever created a simple “Blog” application you have already reinvented it. When you need to access any post at some URL you need to identify it somehow. The simplest idea is to identify them by id, but…

Testing Bash applications

Some time ago I was faced with a task of testing a bash script. At first I decided to use Python unit-tests, however, I was reluctant to bring external technologies to the project. Therefore I had to go with the testing framework written in the notorious bash. Overview of the existing solutions After googling available…

Is Yarn still a thing?

When npm@5 was just released this question was the first one I have googled. No doubts it comes to mind since new npm version introduced a lot of yarn’s features. In other words: should I still use yarn after installing npm@5? Yarn features Why do people use yarn in the first place…

Generating mock data with Mimesis: Part II

We have already published how to generate mock data with the help of a Python library — Mimesis. The article you are reading now is the continuation of the previous one, therefore, we will not be going over the basics again. In case you missed out on the first article…

Generating mock data using Mimesis: Part I

The ability to generate mock but valid data comes in handy in app development, where you need to work with databases. Filling in the database by hand is a time-consuming and tedious process, which can be done in three stages — gathering necessary information, post-processing the data and coding the…

Why changes in Phoenix 1.3 are so important?

Phoenix Framework always has been awesome. But it was never as awesome as the new 1.3 release (which is rc1 right now actually). There are a lot of significant changes. Chris McCord made a great job writing a complete migrating guide. Inspired by it and by the talk Chris gave…

Books to get you started in UX

The following books got me hooked on the idea of working in UX and educating myself on the…

Managing Django’s settings

Managing Django’s settings might be tricky. There are severals issues which are encountered by any Django developer along the way. First one is caused by the default project structure. Django clearly offers us a single settings.py file. It seams reasonable at the first glance. And it is actually easy to…