Today I was doing some programming, trying to finish up an old project that was 80% done, but I never finished. The project is an API for sharing beer ingredient data, being the avid homebrewer that I am. I was in the middle of writing some pretty simple authentication logic, when I found a weird [...]Continue reading
Building a Web App From the Ground Up: Developing a React.js Frontend for your API — Part 4
This post is part of a series of mine on building web applications from the ground up. It covers everything you need to know to completely finish a web application. If you haven't been following the series, please go back and read part 1. Recap In part 3 of this series, we made a RESTful API [...]Continue reading
Building a Web App From the Ground Up: Django Rest Framework API Development — Part 3
This post is part of a series of mine on building web applications from the ground up. It covers everything you need to know to completely finish a web application. If you haven't been following the series, please go back and read part 1. Recap In the last part of this series we successfully setup our [...]Continue reading
Building a Web App From the Ground Up: API Setup— Part 2
This post is part of a series of mine on building web applications from the ground up. It covers everything you need to know to completely finish a web application. If you haven't been following the series, please go back and read part 1. In this part, I'll show you how to start building an API [...]Continue reading
Building a Web App From the Ground Up: Getting Started — Part 1
So you want to build a web app. Well what's stopping you? If you're reading this, you've probably already been programming for some time, but you're just missing some of the steps. I've been there before. I know how frustrating it can be to know 70% of what you need to do to build a [...]Continue reading
An Overview of Web App Architectures
In the modern world of web app architecture it's truly too easy to become lost in the variety of options available to us. When it comes to building web applications, a few stand out. But the task of deciding which architecture to use is still daunting. We're all probably familiar with the classic Model View Controller pattern [...]Continue reading
4 Reasons To Separate Your Web App’s UI and API
Unless your web application is 100% client-side code, you should split it into a backend API and a frontend client. Too often people fall into the trap of believing that because they need a "quick" turnaround they shouldn't spend the time developing a separate API and client-side app, or they believe that their application is [...]Continue reading
Climbing Mountains and Building Software
A few months ago I left on a hiking trip with some friends. We never made it to our destination. I left the planning of the trip to my friends, thinking that it would turn out okay. But once we started hiking on the first day it was clear we were never going to make it. [...]Continue reading
To ICSE ’16 and Back Again: A Research Tale
I recently went to Austin, Texas to present my research on best practices and common mistakes in game development at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '16). My paper, titled "What Went Right and What Went Wrong": An Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Game Development, presents an empirical study on postmortem reviews from game development. I coauthored [...]Continue reading
Django Server Setup
This tutorial will show you how to serve a Django application by using PostgreSQL, Gunicorn, and NGinx on an Ubuntu server. I created this tutorial because when I started configuring my server, I had a lot of trouble finding anything useful when it came to serving Django apps built in Python 3. I found that virtually all the tutorials I could find still insisted on using Python 2. So, this will show you how to turn your Python 3 Django app into a fully fledged website.
Continue reading