Why my local development environment will never mirror the production environment

A few days ago I stumbled upon a discussion on Twitter of whether or not a local development environment should be kept identical to the production environment:

A decade ago, we had a simple rule: Keep your dev environment identical to production environment.

Is it even possible today?

— Jaana B. Dogan (@rakyll) August 13, 2019

The original assumption in the tweet is by itself interesting: Did we actually have that rule? Keep the development environment identical to the production environment? Did it ever work?

From my personal close to 20 year experience in software engineering I never had the situation where a development environment actually mirrored the production environment. And I would even go as far as to say: That’s a good thing!

Let’s dive into why I think that is.

Why and how to pick a UI framework for prototyping web-based experiences.

When you are looking for a way to build useful, usable and beautiful digital products in a faster way, UI frameworks might be worth a look. But since there are tons of options, deciding on one is definitely challenging: Here is how we approached this challenge.

How we deal with behaviours and boilerplate

We at BetterDoc are big fans of using the Elixir library mox for creating test mocks. When using mox you define behaviours as basis for your mocks. You can think of behaviours as interfaces in object oriented languages such as Java: a set of function signatures that a module has to implement.

While this approach is great - check out this blog post on the why - it tends to require a bit of boilerplate code. In this post we are going to explore how we use behaviours for mocking, the reasoning behind it, and how we reduced the necessary boilerplate to an absolute minimum by using metaprogramming.

Why we should consciously think about ethics in our day-to-day business

Some rationals to stop talking and start acting.

Hosting the Web Meetup Cologne

We are proud to host the Web Meetup Cologne this evening in our office.

Topics for the evening: “Writing SPAs without JS and code without bugs”.

A better JSON export for Heroku Dataclips with jq

Are you using PostgreSQL on Heroku? Then, you should know Heroku Dataclips, a no-hassle, web based tool you can use to access and export your data using SQL. And it even supports JSON export! Sadly, the JSON exported by Heroku is not as nicely formatted as you might wish for in some situations.

Conference Review: DevDays Vilnius 2019

In May I had the honor of having been invited as opening keynote speaker to the DevDays 2019 in Vilnius.

Luckily I also had the chance to see a lot of other great talks that made me curious about new technologies, showed me things I hadn’t thought about before and made me appreciate a few things I always took for granted.

In this post I would like to highlight a few of my favorites:

Validating deployment environments with Servicefiles

Whenever we deploy something we should make sure that the target environment is compatible with these changes. In this post I want to focus on making sure expected configuration settings are where they are supposed to be.

More or less every application deployed on a server needs some sort of configuration settings. You may call them settings, properties, adjustment or flags - but they all fulfill the same purpose: To configure details of an application.

The everyday feedback that I want (...to give)

This is a totally subjective point of view from someone who is not a manager. In my current team at BetterDoc, I am extremely happy about the kind of feedback I get and about the way I can give feedback. To figure out the reasons for this, I thought it might help me to write it down. So this post is actually about the way we give work related feedback on an everyday basis - about what I expect from colleagues, mentors and of course also from myself when we discuss my/our work. This post is definitely not about feedback regarding general behaviour, half-year performance reviews, general project reviews, retrospectives or anything on a meta level. I am very pleased about any feedback on this!

Fun with Phoenix LiveView

As a Learning Friday project, I wanted to try out Phoenix LiveViews. This is about what I was able to create in one day, starting from scratch.