From Now To Next
The goal of this series will be to take a dive into the Ruby web framework Sinatra, and try to discover what it has to offer. Over the course of this journey, I will also be delving into some of the interesting features of the Ruby language and how they can be utilized to build something (hopefully) pretty cool.
After Part 1 where we created a build template in Packer for a Docker compatible image of Windows Server, capable of running containers, I was inspired by the West Wind Album Viewer sample project, and decided it was time to start developing a containerized app for the server to run. With Visual Studio 2017 and .NET Framework 4.7, there is native support for running containerized applications with Docker.
About a month ago someone at work turned me on to testing with Selenium. I was blown away with the functionality and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Selenium automates the actions that you write in your tests. It gives you a great visual picture of what is happening. I quickly tried to implement some of the Selenium concepts in my own work. Using Selenium is about as easy as getting started with Nunit which was my previous blog here.
For this next part we are going setup a basic node/React site (the ultimate goal being a running a Phaser app built on node/React running in AWS). First we’ll dig into the dependencies we need and then we’ll move on to the various bits of code necessary to get up and running.
Coming into this I knew next to nothing about Unit testing. The testing I had implemented in the past had always been scrutinized as the wrong way of testing and not really unit testing but more like integration testing. Unit testing for me has been a way to fix nuances in code. For me, I’ve always used the approach of coding first and testing after but I have heard of cases where testing first methodology has worked. For those of you that are new to unit testing, in general, you might be able to find a better understanding of what unit testing is by using some of the documentation that I’ve found.
Welcome to Part 2 of my “Getting Started With Python” series. In part one, I looked at Python from an outsider’s perspective. I knew that most programming languages had common constructs for looping, conditionals, and other flow control mechanisms, but I also know that Python syntax is largely different than the curly brace languages I had been using for the entirety of my career. I wasn’t sure what kind of learning curve I was jumping into, but I had a plethora of baseball statistics at my fingertips and I wanted to write something that could massage them into a format I could use for my purposes. Thus, I carved out some time and got my hands dirty.
This is the first in a series of blog posts chronicling my journey into the world of programming with Python.
The purpose of this series is to familiarize myself with hosting a website inside Amazon Web Services (AWS). But not just any website… This website will have it’s foundation built on React and node.js… The best part is the content of this site and I’m not talking “Hello World!” (well maybe at first)… This site will be a JavaScript WebGL game using the Phaser game engine!
In order to begin my journey into exploring Docker, I felt the need to incorporate as many of the 12 Factor principles as I could into my development pipeline. I also wanted to have a clean place to get started on a Docker workflow, that was isolated from my normal .NET Development environment so as not to conflict, or pickup and unneeded dependencies. I had heard a lot about Hashicorp, and the tools they build for “provisioning, securing, connecting, and running any infrastructure for any application”. So, I decided I wanted to start there, with a fresh Packer Image that could be built, and reused from “scratch” as many times as I would need.
Welcome to the Laughlin Constable Dev Team Blog! This will serve as a documentation of our team’s journey into technology. The idea started as an effort to get our team to go outside their comfort zone. Often times we fall into “maintenance mode” where we spend our days working very hard to meet deadlines and respond to issues and this usually comes at the expense of finding time for innovation and growth. This is our answer to that problem. We hope you enjoy your stay.