Blog Posts

Being updated is an important need for all technology professionals. These days, there are many ways to get updated and we are at times overwhelmed with the things we read. To help this situations, and get a rundown of a curated list of links to read for any topic is subscribe to a weekly.

Weeklies are compact and organized list of links with articles, podcasts, videos etc. They are focused to a related to a topic, technology, language or framework delivered to you email inbox each week. This post curates a list of 3 weeklies for all software engineer/developers. The main 3 weeklies are language and framework agnostic. Towards the end there is mention of some language, framework and CMS specific weeklies.

"How do I get new team members contributing code to the project in a matter of minutes/hours not days?" is a common question heard in development teams. There are some ways to do, in my opinion docker is one of the best.

Docker enables using the same software stack in development, staging and production. You don't need to worry about the version of PHP, MYSQL or any other dependency with Docker. This post will be about Laravel and MariaDB (MySQL) with Docker for local development. It will also feature the use of docker-compose. We will use PHP 5.6 and MariaDB 10.1 with Laravel 5.1. This guide helps getting started with Laravel and Docker with a database.

Software development is not just punching some code on the keyboard for desired output. The business side of software development always takes priority than the technicalities of it.

I have seen some software development teams are slow because they have a lot of technical debt. Some teams are naive, the members don't want to explore new things . They are stuck with 5 year old technology like FTP, old legacy framework etc. In this post, I will shed some light on the four basic and important pillars of a solid software application that support creating reliable software. This contents of post is language and framework agnostic. It is applicable to any software project.

Just knowing git and all team members pushing code to the main branch (master) is not a good practice. To leverage the most out of git, it is a good idea to do feature branching and follow a branching model. GitFlow is one of the options for doing a feature branching model but it is not so straight forward, In this blog post with a video and presentation I would elaborate on how a team can use simplified gitflow and get the most out of using git.

The process of getting a completed feature or bug fix code from the development environment to your web servers is web software deployment. We have been deploying code in various ways, a decade back we were used to uploading our files using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). I would not considering copying files from the development machine to a web server a form of automated deployment, basically it was a necessary evil at that time.

If you still use FTP at this time like 22% of Nepali developers you really need to move on. In this post I will briefly mention some deployment tools and try to analyze their pros and cons. Still as the title reads the best automated deployment tool is the one that best fits your needs.