We’ve written 24 blog posts about Back-end Development. View all topics »
At Happy Cog, we work on a sprint-based cadence. Designers and developers are allocated to open projects for a specific number of hours in each sprint, and we try to keep our team members planned up to 6 months into the future. Priorities, allocations, and assignments always change during that timeframe, but having a baseline plan in place helps us forecast hiring needs and prepare early for larger engagements.
Aging happens to every project that survives long enough; it can't be stopped by any plan, sprint, or project approach. Technical debt is accrued, features are abandoned, tradeoffs are made—it's the natural byproduct of building software.
Using GitHub Actions for your CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery or Deployment) process offers some great features and solves a number of pain points, such as automated testing and sending notifications for successes/failures.
The staggering pace of growth and change in tools, technologies, and capabilities is one of the most exciting and daunting aspects of the web. As a developer in client services, a critical component of my job has always involved learning what needs to be learned in order to allow our clients to understand and take advantage of the benefits of this pace. Whether it’s an unfamiliar codebase, a new framework, or new browser capabilities — new challenges are always on the horizon.
Craft CMS’ admin dashboard is very intuitive, while providing a lot of complex features and functionality. A great deal of this functionality depends on Craft's very own global variable (“Craft”) which extends Pixel & Tonic's GarnishJS UI Toolkit library.
A version of this article was originally published in 2019 but has been updated to reflect the most recent advancements in headless technology for Craft CMS as of April 2021.
What is a headless CMS? A headless CMS is a major shift from the traditional model for delivering web content. It is not a single technology, it is an approach for serving web pages and data to your users. Rather than have a single codebase handle both content management and presentation of that content, a headless CMS is only concerned with content management, leaving presentation up to other parts of the tech stack.
As a Solutions Architect at Happy Cog, I often find myself in the weeds working with complex server architectural configurations in our clients’ AWS platforms. You may often find me setting up complex infrastructure by code with AWS Terraform, deploying fleets of EC2 instances powered by Continuous Integration pipelines, and working to curate complex load balancing solutions for our clients who receive unexpected bursts of views from our marketing campaigns (the list goes on).
Why are doctors sometimes considered “cool under pressure?” Is it because their personality is one that doesn’t get riled up when faced with a challenge? Is it because they have an ingrained character trait that allows them to remain calm when everyone else is completely losing it? Have you ever noticed that web developers are sometimes labeled the same way? Is it the same thing? Are web developers saving the world too? Probably not.
Guys I figured it out! I figured out how to code type on the web.
I kid. However I have been really digging my approach to type in the template-build phase as of late. It’s super simple, saves you tons of time, makes your files smaller, and communication both with your teammates and the client more focused. I’m not selling CSS snake oil here, I’m just that into it.
Over the last year, I have been using Brad Frost & Dave Olsen’s PatternLab for many projects. In doing so, I have learned about building systems rather than web pages. Most of what I’ve learned is that I’ve been doing wrong out of habit.
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