General

A New Approach to Changing the Ratio in Tech-Breaking Barriers Through Open Source

Oct 28, 2019

2 min read

This Dot launches the open source apprentice program in hopes of creating a more inclusive tech community.

This Dot, a prominent female-run development consultancy, announces the launch of their Open Source Apprentice Program which provides a pathway for companies to invest in changing the ratio in tech.

While boot camps have helped underrepresented minorities get into tech averaging a 43% female and 25% black/latino demographic (Course Report), only half of those who graduate are able to find employment in a reasonable time (Dice).

As the diversity ratio continues to be off-balance, the money supporting open source development in companies like Google and Microsoft continues to grow exponentially. It makes business sense; Google’s open source framework Angular averages over 1.5 million users monthly and Facebook’s open source library React supports over 20 million monthly downloads.

With This Dot’s Open Source Apprentice Program, companies can direct the extensive work needed to be done to support users of these technologies to the pipeline of women in tech waiting for a chance to get in the door of their first tech job.

The program provides a myriad of solutions, including a diverse pipeline, candidate vetting to prevent interview bias from hiring managers, and mentorship needed to create inclusive environments for new developers to thrive.

“This is a great way for companies to invest their development dollars. Tell us your objectives, and we will work with you to get the work done through our apprentices. We hope companies see this as not only a business solution but also a way to change their diversity ratios now. The best part about the program is that, you can hire our apprentices after working with them.” says Tracy Lee, Lead at This Dot Labs.

This Dot has successful growing partnerships and contributions with multiple open source projects associated with Airbnb, Preact, Vue, NgRx, NativeScript, Angular, VMWare, Treebo Hotels, Applitools, and that list continues to grow weekly.

Brandon Roberts, a maintainer of NgRx and a member of Google’s Angular team says, “working with a URM to get a PR submitted couldn’t have turned out any better. They were very responsive, open to feedback, and quick to handle the requested changes throughout the process.”

“The apprentice program is not just for open source projects. In fact, if your company has dollars they’d like to spend on consulting, we are happy to partner with you to do the work.” says Eva Howe of This Dot.

To find out more about the Open Source Apprentice Program, contact This Dot at hirethefempire@thisdot.co or submit an inquiry at http://thisdot.co/hirethefempire.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

This Dot

Giving Thanks for Diversity in Tech: Angie Jones

Angie Jones is a San Francisco-based Senior Developer Advocate at Applitools, as well as the Director of Test Automation University, a free, community-driven educational program that provides training to test automation teams. A Master Inventor, Angie currently holds 26 patents across both the United States as well as China, and has garnered a reputation as a leading innovator in the tech community through not only her work, but also her regular international speaking engagements. Angie has delivered talks on topics ranging from visual testing, to clean code, and even testing AI-enabled applications, having recently spoken on large international stages, including Selenium Conference in Chicago, STAREAST Testing Conference in Orlando, and Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany, just to name a few. Not only a prolific speaker and creator, Angie also finds time to volunteer with Black Girls Code, an organization through which she hosts workshops for young women interested in getting into web development. Angie has a very busy 2020 on the horizon, with upcoming talks at JSConf Hawaii, Devnexus, TSQA, SauceCon, STPCon, RenderATL, and Agile Testing Days. We can’t wait to see what else she will accomplish in the new year! Want to keep up with everything Angie is doing in 2020? You can follow her at @techgirl1908!...

Dec 31, 2019

2 mins

GeneralDiversity

Giving Thanks to Diversity in Tech: Faiza Yousuf

Faiza Yousuf is a multifaceted open source technologist. She wears many hats, serving as the CTO of a stealth-mode startup, working as a product consultant, and running WomenInTechPK, a 6000+ member community for women in Pakistan. In addition to these roles, Faiza also runs a Coding Bootcamp in Karachi, PK with her partner Shamim Rajani, which has taught over 700 girls how to code, and have placed many of them in paid internships and jobs! Despite already organizing her own massive tech community, Faiza is also the Pakistani chapter leader of CryptoChicks, through which she has hosted numerous hackathons. Faiza also regularly speaks at engagements both locally and internationally, having most recently delivered talks on Empathy in Business, and served on panels discussing the challenges that women face in the workplace. “My team and I have been working tirelessly to create a better tech ecosystem locally and so far we have seen that the first step is to make people aware of their biases and to learn to distinctly see stereotypes and not let them cloud their judgement. Understanding our biases is the first step towards learning to value and appreciate all people.” When asked about her perspective on inclusion in the tech industry, Faiza added that, “The next step is to have more role models for women, for people of color, for differently-abled people, for people from underprivileged or disadvantaged backgrounds.” Even with her busy schedule, Faiza is an avid reader, and commits herself to reading one book every week! She encourages people, who would like to attend one of her local conferences, or international talks, to keep an eye on her Twitter page: @FaizaYousuf, where she will update you in the coming year!...

Dec 18, 2019

2 mins

Diversity

Announcing October JavaScript Marathon - Free, online training!

Join us October 28th, 2020 for our next JavaScript Marathon! JavaScript Marathon is a full day of free, online courses on React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and more. Come learn about some of the leading web development technologies, and concepts! Stay for one training, or stick around for the whole day! No two sessions will be the same! --- React Hooks 201 *Featuring Kyle Hill @ 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT* It might have taken a little while, but: have you mastered the use of useState, and maybe even (mostly) understand what useEffect is doing at this point? Cool. Let’s level up our React Hooks skills further by diving into some of the other tools in our box. We’ll leverage useContext and useReducer to create an easy to implement interaction and data flow that scales along with your application and your team. --- Getting Started with Eleventy *Featuring Kyle Mitofsky @ 12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT* Eleventy is a JavaScript based Static Site Generator (SSG) that's designed around performance, accessibility, and simplicity. Take your first steps to build out front end designs, websites, and content with this walk through that'll get you set up on your first eleventy site. Learn some of the basics with some patterns and best practices as well. --- TypeScript for Beginners *Featuring Dacey Nolan @ 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT* During this introduction to TypeScript, we will cover what TypeScript is, what benefits it provides, and how you can use it in your projects. Code with me or just follow along as we dive into each of the types and learn how to use them. --- Automating GraphQL Client Code Generation *Featuring Kevin Wolf @ 3:30pm - 4:30pm EDT* In this talk, we will learn how to streamline Front End Development by generating type-safe GraphQL Operations for Apollo Client. --- Building GraphQL Resolvers *Featuring Josh Oppenheim @ 5:00pm - 6:00pm EDT* Have you ever wanted to know how graphql resolvers work or why we use them? In this training we will talk about the philosophy behind resolvers and how they fit in the greater GraphQL flow. We will take a look at how the graphql-js library implements them and we will write some of our own. We will discuss some possible requests from consumers and write resolvers to accommodate the needs presented. --- Need private trainings for your company? If you would like to learn more about how you can leverage This Dot’s expertise to upskill your team, and reinvigorate your developers with new knowledge about the web’s leading development technologies, visit the trainings page....

Sep 23, 2020

2 mins

EnterpriseGeneralJavaScriptTraining

End-to-end type-safety with JSON Schema

End-to-end type-safety with JSON Schema I recently wrote an introduction to JSON Schema post. If you’re unfamiliar with it, check out the post, but TLDR: It’s a schema specification that can be used to define the input and output data for your JSON API. In my post, I highlight many fantastic benefits you can reap from defining schemas for your JSON API. One of the more interesting things you can achieve with your schemas is end-to-end type safety from your backend API to your client application(s). In this post, we will explore how this can be accomplished slightly deeper. Overview The basic idea of what we want to achieve is: * a JSON API server that validates input and output data using JSON Schema * The JSON Schema definitions that our API uses transformed into TypeScript types With those pieces in place, we can achieve type safety on our API server and the consuming client application. The server side is pretty straightforward if you’re using a server like Fastify with already enabled JSON Schema support. This post will focus on the concepts more than the actual implementation details though. Here’s a simple diagram illustrating the high-level concept: We can share the schema and type declaration between the client and server. In that case, we can make a request to an endpoint where we know its type and schema, and assuming the server validates the data against the schema before sending it back to the client, our client can be confident about the type of the response data. Marrying JSON Schema and TypeScript There are a couple of different ways to accomplish this: * Generating types from schema definitions using code generation tools * Creating TypeBox definitions that can infer TypeScript types and be compiled to JSON Schema I recommend considering both and figuring out which would better fit your application and workflows. Like anything else, each has its own set of trade-offs. In my experience, I’ve found TypeBox to be the most compelling if you want to go deep with this pattern. Code generation A couple of different packages are available for generating TS types from JSON Schema definitions. * https://github.com/bcherny/json-schema-to-typescript * https://github.com/vega/ts-json-schema-generator They are CLI tools that you can provide a glob path to where your schema files are located and will generate TS declaration files to a specified output path. You can set up an npm hook or a similar type of script that will generate types for your development environment. TypeBox TypeBox is a JSON Schema type builder. With this approach, instead of json files, we define schemas in code using the TypeBox API. The TypeBox definitions infer to TypeScript types directly, which eliminates the code generation step described above. Here’s a simple example from the documentation of a JSON Schema definition declared with TypeBox: ` This can then be inferred as a TypeScript type: ` Aside from schemas and types, TypeBox can do a lot more to help us on our type-safety journey. We will explore it a bit more in upcoming sections. Sharing schemas between client and server applications Sharing our JSON Schema between our server and client app is the main requirement for end-to-end type-safety. There are a couple of different ways to accomplish this, but the simplest would be to set up our codebase as a monorepo that contains both the server and client app. Some popular options for TypeScript monorepos are: PNPM, Turborepo, and NX. If a monorepo is not an option, you can publish your schema and types as a package that can be installed in both projects. However, this setup would require a lot more maintenance work. Ultimately, as long as you can import your schemas and types from the client and server app, you are in good shape. Server-to-client validation and type-safety For the sake of simplicity, let's focus on data flowing from the server to the client for now. Generally speaking, the concepts also apply in reverse, as long as your JSON API server validates your inputs and outputs. We’ll look at the most basic version of having strongly typed data on the client from a request to our server. Type-safe client requests In our server application, if we validate the /users endpoint with a shared schema - on the client side, when we make the request to the endpoint, we know that the response data is validated using the user schema. As long as we are confident of this fact, we can use the generated type from that schema as the return type on our client fetch call. Here’s some pseudocode: ` Our server endpoint would look something like this: ` You could get creative and build out a map that defines all of your endpoints, their metadata, and schemas, and use the map to define your server endpoints and create an API client. Transforming data over the wire Everything looks stellar, but we can still take our efforts a bit further. To this point, we are still limited to serialized JSON data. If we have a created_at field (number or ISO string) tied to our user, and we want it to be a Date object when we get a hold of it on the client side - additional work and consideration are required. There are some different strategies out there for deserializing JSON data. The great thing about having shared schemas between our client and server is that we can encode our type information in the schema without sending additional metadata from our server to the client. Using format to declare type data In my initial JSON Schema blog post, I touched on the format field of the specification. In our schema, if the actual type of our date is a string in ISO8601 format, we can declare our format to be "date-time". We can use this information on the client to transform the field into a proper Date object. ` Transforming serialized JSON Data This can be a little bit tricky; again, there are many ways to accomplish it. To demonstrate the concept, we’ll use TypeBox to define our schemas as discussed above. TypeBox provides a Transform type that you can use to declare, encode, and decode methods for your schema definition. ` It even provides helpers to statically generate the decoded and encoded types for your schema ` If you declare your decode and encode functions for your schemas, you can then use the TypeBox API to handle decoding the serialized values returned from your JSON API. Here’s what the concept looks like in practice fetching a user from our API: ` Nice. You could use a validation library like Zod to achieve a similar result but here we aren’t actually doing any validation on our client side. That happened on the server. We just know the types based on the schema since both ends share them. On the client, we are just transforming our serialized JSON into what we want it to be in our client application. Summary There are a lot of pieces in play to accomplish end-to-end type safety. With the help of JSON Schema and TypeBox though, it feels like light work for a semi-roll-your-own type of solution. Another great thing about it is that it’s flexible and based on pretty core concepts like a JSON API paired with a TypeScript-based client application. The number of benefits that you can reap from defining JSON Schemas for your APIs is really great. If you’re like me and wanna keep it simple by avoiding GraphQL or other similar tools, this is a great approach....

Apr 17, 2024

6 mins

JSONTypeScript

A New Approach to Changing the Ratio in Tech-Breaking Barriers Through Open Source

This Dot

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