Year end!

Here we are, almost at the end of another year, crikey. As is pretty much the norm, we’ve all been heads-down working frantically, and thus neglecting this poor blog. What’s new?

Well, we’re finishing up a large project using our platform to deliver a spanking new version of a multi-tenant web application. We’re also working on projects making use of Google apps script, node, Kubernetes, and more, with Domino migration work underway too!

In other news, Engage 2018 is a go for LDC Via: we’ll be in Rotterdam, how about you?

MongoDB Europe 2017

It’s been quiet on this site for a couple of months, and that’s because as usual we’re all heads-down working. So many things to do, so many things. Sometimes however, one has to take a step back and look around, see what’s happening, see what’s around the corner, and see what others are doing.

A few years ago, all of us attended MongoDB “days” in London which were interesting, niche-ish geek-fests. That has really changed now. MongoDB is over a decade old, and at the MongoDB Europe conference today, they officially announced version 3.6, and its impressive feature-set.

Our intrepid loon Ben attended said conference which was well-organised, well-attended, and pretty well-populated with useful content. Particular sessions of note included those on the forthcoming developer-focused product MongoDB Stitch, along with MongoDB Atlas which has been in beta for some time. These satellite offerings look great (oh my: query-able back-ups in Atlas!), but what of the core product?

Well, version 3.6 of MongoDB offers a number of intriguing features, which can be summarised as follows:

• Change streams: invoked with a simple coll.watch() these are Observers for MongoDB. Fab!
• “Retryable” writes in the event of failures.
• Oodles of document updates including hugely increased “expressibility” in queries, aggregations, pipelining, array processing and updating. These look to be very powerful, and I think Matt will be cock-a-hoop with them.
• R driver to support advanced analytics and business intelligence.
• Support for JSON schema.
• Tunable consistency: customise your app’s balance between read-write consistency needs and overall availability.

You can read more about 3.6 and the future of MongoDB on the official web site.

A default of ‘NO’

LDC Via is, in my experience, a unique company: it started out as a group of consultants gathered together to help each other and share skills and experience, and then the Via product grew out of the realisation that so many of the things that we’re asked to deliver did not exist in the market.

That still holds to this day: we don’t have a default answer to every question of “NO” like many fixed products do, but nor do we default to “YES” like the sales teams for every cloud vendor ever (and then bite you later on). What we do is take a platform that we built with care that provides 90% of what we think people will need, and then we mould the rest to match exact requirements. We don’t presume to tell you what you need.

We built LDC Via from various components, not just the current internet darlings and not necessarily the libraries that are most popular and safe at corporations. We built Via with an eye to a solid foundation that will serve both you and us for years to come.

That is what makes the difference: we are all consultants used to dealing with other people’s platforms, and trying to get around the hard “YES” and “NO” of other’s limitations. Now we don’t have to do that; we can change things if it makes sense to do so, and this is a breath of fresh air, something to be proud of as we see the platform grow.

We do not default to “Yes”, we do not default to “No”. Our default is “What do you need?”

Oh a-linting I will go

Often when I talk with developers who are firmly in the C# or Java camp their main objection to JavaScript is that it’s not strongly typed. And indeed, if you’re new to the world of JavaScript, this is a big thing to get over.

But there are strategies, best practices if you will, which can make the transition easier. One I thought worth mentioning is ESLint. This is a process whereby you statically validate your code to make sure it adheres to a set of rules you define. These rules can be as lax or strict as you like, but, applied properly they make your code more supportable, more readable and less error-prone.

So, how to get started I hear you ask? A lot depends on your working environment. If you use a modern editor like VS Code, Atom or Sublime Text then there will be a plugin you can install to help you along. In your project, you add a .eslintrc file which defines the rules you want to apply and then you look, with horror, at the hundreds of errors that have suddenly appeared in your code.

But fear not, things aren’t as bad as they appear. Your ESLint plugin will probably have a command to automatically fix “easily fixable issues” such as using single quotes rather than double quotes for strings, or indentation of your code. Once these are all addressed you can fix the rest of the issues manually, and relatively quickly.

I’ve recently completed this exercise with a large code base primarily because we want to put some focus on performance: if I have code that is predictably organised, then this makes the process a lot easier.

A great side effect is that the rest of the developers on the team can pick up the code I’ve been butchering and immediately have some familiarity with the style.

The most popular eslint configuration is published by AirBnB as an open source project. It’s a great starting point, but the beauty of these configurations is that if you don’t like a rule then you can simply turn it off. Or, on a case by case basis you can also turn off the rule in your code. As an example, here is the LDC Via .eslintrc file.

Linting your code is not, in itself going to make it great code, but it will be a big help to you and, at the end of the day you can go home with a slightly smug feeling that you’ve gone that extra step to be a good programmer. And who doesn’t like to feel a bit smug sometimes?

My editor is Sublime Text

The fourth and final post in an occasional series looking at each of our preferred code editors.

A lot has been said, written, and ranted, about programming editors and IDEs over the years. Allow us to add to the noise.

It’s Julian’s turn to finish this series by talking about his choice, Sublime Text…

Before I dive into my choice, let’s have a quick recap of my colleagues’ well-considered picks.

Ben works in Atom. He likes it because it’s clean, flexible, open-source, free, built on top of Electron, and has a huge variety of packages available to allow him to tailor it to his preferences and needs.

Matt works in Visual Studio Code. Despite the “Visual Studio” name, this is a lightweight editor, which he now prefers to Atom, not least for its top-notch integration with things like Git. Like Atom, it’s built on Electron and has a good selection of plug-ins to allow him to customise it.

Mark works in WebStorm. This is the lightweight companion product to IntelliJ IDEA, which he likes for its approach to source code control, amongst other things.

As for me, I work in Sublime Text. Why? Because [a] it’s installed and [b] I’m lazy.