With mixed emotions, I’ve decided to leave Zeal after more than five years and join the e-commerce team at InfluxData.

Because many floating point numbers can’t be represented exactly in a computer, most testing frameworks provide a way of checking that a floating point result is “close enough” to the expected value. In a recent Python project, I learned that pytest has a solution to this problem that I’d never seen before.

Some time ago, I wrote several posts about encapsulating the Redux state tree using reducers and selectors, the asymmetry between reducers and selectors, and the problems that arise when attempting to resolve that asymmetry in a modular-structured Redux application. Thanks to a wonderful blog post by Nicholas Gallagher, I now have a better solution to the problems.

I recently added support for several introspection methods to the DoubleAgents test double library for VisualWorks Smalltalk.

Many IDEs provide automated refactorings that can speed up development. Features like smart renaming and inlining or extracting variables and methods are really nice. There’s one refactoring that very few IDEs provide directly, but that I find particularly useful: Extract Method to Component.

Recently, CircleCI launched a new version of their continuous integration platform, CircleCI 2.0. Several of our clients at work upgraded and immediately saw a huge reduction in build times. I decided to try it out on my Elixir side project.

There’s a lot of open-source software out there, and we often need to use multiple libraries to accomplish our goals. But sometimes, libraries and tools don’t work together cohesively. There’s a lot of value in filling in the gaps.

In mobile applications, it is sometimes necessary to store information securely on the device. While React Native has the AsyncStorage API for storing data on the device, it is not secure by default, especially on a device that has been jail-broken or has root access.

I recently finished building my first Elixir application, a command-line application for managing invoices for my side work.

Sometimes a mobile application needs to know when it becomes active or inactive. React Native provides the AppState API for this. There are several ways to use this API, including a new one that my colleagues and I just released.