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RJ Dela-Cruz

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Renchar (a.k.a. RJ) is a Keyhole Consultant, Father, Husband, and Programmer. He's done a lot with both Java and JavaScript development for various clients across the Midwest, with particular emphasis in the insurance industry.

How Relative Story Sizing Won Me Over

RJ Dela-Cruz Agile, Articles, Consulting, Project Management Leave a Comment

Anyone who practices agile methodologies such as scrum is going to be very familiar with the practice of story pointing user stories (also known as poker planning). The good ole’ fashion 4, 8, 13, etc. Fibonacci sequences we assign to user stories of a sprint.

If you’re not familiar, it’s where the team gathers together to discuss the user stories to bring into a coming sprint and assigning each a number called story points. These story points are estimates that represent the level of difficulty and time it is expected to take to complete the story.

The team often will have discussions on whether a story is a particular story point number and argue their point of view until the team comes to an agreement to what story point it should be. I’ve done this type of work estimation for a long time that it’s natural for me… until we did something a bit different on a scrum team that I was a part of.

In this blog, we discuss a different way to assign poker points to user stories that could be beneficial to your scrum team – relative story sizing.

Angular and Swagger: Experiences Learned

RJ Dela-Cruz Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript 2 Comments

Recently I was fortunate enough to be a part of a project where we were building an application from scratch into an Angular front-end application with Microservices in the back end. Swagger was used as the contract between the UI and Microservices.

In this blog, I talk about the things I learned from this project experience, like how to use Swagger to define the endpoints of the Microservices, integrating Swagger-generated code into Angular, and working with configuration (including oAuth2 tokens), among other “gotchas…”

An Example Progressive Web App on Android

RJ Dela-Cruz Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile 1 Comment

In my experience, the best way to learn a new technology is to create something tangible with it. I recently sought out to learn Angular and Angular Material. So, I developed an experimental Angular app that uses omdbapi to query Movie Posters. It’s aptly named Movie Poster Finder.

Developing the Movie Poster Finder application, I ran into a thing called PWA, which is also known as Progressive Web Applications. I thought it was really neat that both Android and mobile Chrome treat them as native applications.

In this post, I will show an example Progressive Web Application in action, explaining what I encountered when turning an experimental Angular web application into a PWA.