DEV Community: Corey Johnson

Should I learn react before trying to learn Gatsby?

Corey Johnson — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 03:13:40 +0000

I'm new-ish on the web development front, haven't done anything in years and even then I was primarily focused on learning fundamentals of html, css, js, jquery and the like. I never really had exposure to some of the front end frameworks that are so popular today.

I recently started a little side project to build a portfolio page for a family member, and I was going to use Gatsby because it seems like it'd suit the project well. I'm not sure if my inexperience with React is going to bite me in the butt though.

Almost all of my experience with professional software is with Android development so this is out of my wheelhouse. Would love some insight!

How to write tests for a library that requires being run on the browser (like Dexie.js or localforage)?

Corey Johnson — Fri, 03 May 2019 15:53:40 +0000

I've been trying to take a TDD approach to building up a side project using mocha and chai, but I've been hitting a wall lately. I want to use localforage, but I can't seem to write automated tests that run and interact with localforage since it requires being run on a browser. I want to wrap a library and write tests to cover the class that I created. Is there a way to do this?

How do you measure your test coverage?

Corey Johnson — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:13:31 +0000

In some places and teams I've worked with, I've been asked what % of test coverage we want to shoot for and I've never had a good answer. I personally try to write tests that I think help define or validate a piece of code I work on.

When I run a code coverage scan in Android Studio, it's usually quite a low percentage. However it seems odd to me that you'd have a test for an immutable model that tests all fields.

What do you think? How would you measure coverage?

Recording Your Learning Survey Results

Corey Johnson — Fri, 29 Mar 2019 22:48:02 +0000

Hello everyone! As some of you might have seen; I ran a short survey and got about 20 responses. While not a viral survey by any means, I did have a great opportunity to learn a little more about the problem domain I'm looking at. I also learned a little bit about making surveys.

Drafting the survey

It helped to have a problem domain I wanted to look at. I'm wanting to build some kind of note app, but I didn't really have a good grasp of what problems existed for current systems. I would say it's important not to guide your survey participants in a specific direction.

Realizing I have a bad question in the survey

After about 4 people responded to the survey; I realized that I had a question that was essentially useless. I was worried about breaking the survey link, so I just left the question in there. This probably could have been avoided if I had done a quick survey with a person or two in order to test the usefulness of each question.

Deciding the length of time to keep the survey open

I had 11 responses on the first day of the survey, 3 responses on the second, and 7 on the third day. By the 4th day I had no responses and I felt I could see a decent gathering of common information gathered by the survey, so I decided to close it. I had recruited a number of other people to take the survey manually on the 3rd day, which is where the spike came from.

Getting participants

Honestly this was the hardest part. I think a majority of participants for the survey were people I recruited through direct communication. I had the idea of going to local coffee shops and asking the manager if I could conduct the survey but I decided a smaller sample set was okay for this purpose.

Results

Here are the results, they are by no means comprehensive for a large audience, but it's a starting point if you're curious to explore this problem domain a little further!

How do you record your learning?

Corey Johnson — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:53:29 +0000

Here are the survey results: https://dev.to/johnson_cor/recording-your-learning-survey-results-kjc

I have a problem, and I want to understand if others face the same kinds of issues I do. I've tried bullet journaling, handwritten notes, and building fancy Google Docs.. Yet I always seem to either lose my notes or never look back at them, even if I need to.

I'd really appreciate anyone willing to take like 5-10 min of their time to fill out the survey, almost everything is optional to fill out :)

Organizational Tip for Gradle

Corey Johnson — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 20:54:31 +0000

If you're anything like me, Gradle can be a bit of a mystery at times. I'm trying to better understand it and what kinds of things I can do to make it my own!

Here's the TL;DR that I included in my post:

1) Create a libraries.gradle file in your root project folder

2) In your project-level gradle, write apply from: 'libraries.gradle' above the buildscript block

3) Declare your dependencies in libraries.gradle, using ext.versions for the version codes, ext.libraries for the gradle artifacts, and ext.libPacks for the implementation groups

4) To use in your module’s build.gradle file in the dependencies block, all you need to do is write libPack.retrofit or libPack.glide

A little more longwinded explanation is here: https://medium.com/@cor.johnson/a-simple-way-to-improve-your-android-build-gradle-files-c7325731b3ea

If anyone has any other awesome tricks they use, I'd love to hear about them!