Comments in Code

Comments In Our Code: Necessary or Not?

Robert Rice Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Spring 1 Comment

No matter what your opinion is on comments, one thing is universally true: developers should create code that the next developer can understand.

Sometimes, comments are a safe, simple way to leave the code better than how you found it. Sometimes, extracting sections of code into a well-named method can be an alternative way of doing this, with the added benefit that (a) you can test this method individually and (b) it may help you to spot smells in your code or see places for further refactoring or simplification.

Each situation you encounter will require different treatment, but I hope this post has given you a starting place for creating clean, readable code in your own life!

Why Functional Programming

James Slaughter Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Python, React 1 Comment

React has gotten a little funny of late – a few years ago, it was normal to embrace the Object-Oriented paradigm, writing each component as a class and doing lots of this-binding.

Today, however, hooks and functional components have taken over React, and with it, a style of programming unusual for front-end frameworks is growing in popularity: Functional Programming.

This programming style has been in use for many years: Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, and OCaml are all established, though mainly out of the mainstream, languages with a rich history and broad application. Thinking ‘functions are first-class citizens’ sounds strange, especially to new JavaScript developers who have spent most of their time in Python or Java that come from an Object-Oriented perspective.

That’s why in this post, we will go over the basics of Functional Programming, how we compose functions, a handy implementation of a ‘pipe’ function that will compose functions, the process of currying and functions-as-return-value, and how we can use these concepts in React using Higher-Order Components.

Leveraging Docker to Quickly Setup an Object Detection API

Adam Costenbader API Development, Articles, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Tutorial 1 Comment

In this blog, we utilize the strengths of Docker containers to quickly spin up two separate containers that we can utilize for our software development needs – one running the DeepStack API software and the other running a utility to help us get started with the DeepStack API.

The best part is that once we are comfortable with our setup, we could quickly and easily stop and remove the DeepStackUI utility container to free up resources all while continuing to run the DeepStack API software without interruption.

Bridging the Gap: Azure App Insights to On-Prem Elastic Stack

Zach Gardner Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial 1 Comment

Recently, while working for a large healthcare client in New York, I ran into an interesting problem that had slim literature on how to solve it.

Our application is primarily on-prem, but it does leverage Azure for a few functions that are easier to solve in a cloud-native environment. We wanted to be able to monitor those functions using the same Elastic Stack that we use to monitor our on-prem application.

I was tasked with building a bridge between where our functionality logs to in Azure (App Insights), and getting that securely back into our Elasticsearch instance that powers our Elastic Stack.

This blog post will detail the solution I landed on. I hope it will be useful to others that need to solve a similar problem!

Spring Boot With GraphQL: What The Cool Kids Are Doing

Matt McCandless API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, GraphQL, Spring, Spring Boot 2 Comments

Attention: This article was published over 5 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.This article is going to introduce you to Spring Boot with GraphQL. We’ll walk through a simple beer app to show you what it …