In ES6, we get a bunch of new native methods for Arrays that are super useful! This is a short blog post that goes over each of the new methods - .from(), .of(), .find(), .findIndex(), .some(), and .every() - and how they work.

This week, we learned about Iterable objects, three different kinds of loops in Javascript, and a new for of loop that ES6 gives us the best of all three worlds!

EcmaScript 6 is one of the newer versions of Javascript that we're now using in a few projects across our teams, and most significantly in our New Design Lab project! As we start to iterate on new features for the lab, we're reviewing and ramping up on the cool shiny features ES6 brings to the table. This week, we learned about some new string methods and destructuring.

This year I participated in SpawnFest 2017, a two day hackathon focused around the BEAM virtual machine. With judging finished, I felt this an appropriate time to reflect on the architecture and process of my submission.

In our design lab, each request to add a new piece of clipart or process a user upload touches our clipart service. Historically, this application has been hosted on EC2 which has led to some problems for us. A combination of inconsistent load and random hangups on certain files has led to it becoming an operational and financial burden. We chose to undertake the work to migrate the code path which was the worst offender to AWS Lambda. While not...

Microsoft is releasing new versions of SQL Server on Linux more and more frequently. Last month brought us SQL Server 2017 Community Technology Preview 2.0 and like the others before, it's a breeze to use with Docker.

Disabling external assets like JavaScript or images can improve the performance of your Rails System Tests. Capybara is the acceptance test framework abstracted by Rails System Tests. It will load all assets on a page before proceeding to the next step in your test. Since, we are only testing interactions with Rails System Tests, we can reduce the page load time by ignoring images, external scripts and fonts. Rails 5.1 introduced SystemTestCase. It is a nice abstraction around Capybara providing...