Throughout my eight years at Source Allies, I have had the opportunity to work on several teams at our various projects. Most of the time our teams work in open collaborative spaces, where pair programming is done side-by-side. However, there are occasions where I have paired with developers remotely. As...

As we head into 2019, it’s time to start thinking about what we want to achieve in the new year, so let’s go goal crazy! Some people think that setting a goal is the easy part and the follow up to make it happen takes all of the effort. I...

Ask any Source Allies teammate what the key to our success is, and they will tell you without hesitation it is our positive culture and ownership mindset. We have a culture that supports teams making their own decisions and shaping their own future. This culture enables Source Allies to be...

In a previous blog post, Brenda Peshak discussed the “Definition of Done”. As a team, we ran through an exercise to understand requirements and determine Minimal Viable Product (MVP). This got me thinking about real life examples of software and how decisions made by product owners and product managers directly...

Each summer Source Allies offers an apprentice program to college students who want to develop their software development and consulting expertise. This summer’s team consisted of four returning apprentices – Alec, Jared, Max, and myself – as well as one new apprentice, Yousef. Project Each year the projects vary from...

While taking stock of my electronics graveyard I came across an old laptop. I had been looking for a reason to play with Docker containers and this laptop provided me an opportunity to do so. Since it was only going to be running Docker containers, I wanted a no-frills setup....

Prerequisites This article builds on the prior article: The “Join” Problem. Conclusion In this series, we walked the reader through the considerations of building a production-ready microservice. More important than the tools we used (e.x. NodeJS, AWS) were the questions we asked. You may choose different tools and libraries for...

The “Join” Problem Modern applications no longer exist in a silo. They need to integrate with other systems within the organization. In a microservice architecture, this is even more valid since very few business processes can be completed by involving only one service. Let us suppose that our product service...

Prerequisites This article builds on the prior article: Node Reference - History. Deleting Humans make mistakes. Your users are humans, and sometimes they will create a product by mistake and will need to delete it. For that scenario, we need a DELETE REST endpoint. There are two main classes of...

Prerequisites This article builds on the prior article: Patch. Tracking History The way our service is currently built, all modifications (PATCH requests) happen in-place to records in DynamoDB. It is common in most production applications that someone will want to know the history of a record. A business user may...