General

Detoxify Your Team Culture with Angela Nelms

Mar 14, 2024

1 min read

Angela Nelms emphasizes humility, transparency, and continuous learning as essential elements of effective leadership and company culture. Her insights shed light on leadership's critical role in organizational success, the essential elements of great leadership, and how to embrace failure as a means of combating workplace toxicity.

Angela emphasizes that customer service and a positive work culture form the foundation of company success. By fostering humility and transparency, leaders create environments where employees feel valued and motivated to deliver outstanding service. Angela stresses the importance of building collaborative teams, nurturing healthy relationships, and addressing toxic cultures promptly, ensuring organizations thrive on trust and respect.

In this conversation, Angela believes that trust is a cornerstone of successful company culture. Building trust among team members and leaders encourages innovation and growth. Investing in employee development, both personally and professionally, fosters a motivated, engaged workforce committed to the organization's success, and helps retain great talent.

Throughout the episode, Angela emphasizes that effective communication and shared vision are paramount in leadership. Promoting transparency and open dialogue cultivates trust and collaboration. By embracing failures as opportunities for growth and openly discussing lessons learned, leaders foster environments where employees feel empowered to take risks and learn. Shared vision ensures alignment with the company's goals and values throughout the organization.

Download this episode here.

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.

6 Steps to AI Adoption: Benefits of LLMs & SLMs with Jerome Hardaway and Rob Ocel

Rob Ocel and Jerome Hardaway continue their series on AI adoption by exploring the world of AI, focusing on small language models (SLMs) and large language models (LLMs). They compare the unique capabilities of SLMs against the vast knowledge encompassed by LLMs, and highlight the transformative potential of AI in driving creativity, problem-solving, and user-centric design in technology. SLMs are designed to excel at specific tasks, offering faster processing and cost-effectiveness due to their open-source nature. These models have proven to be invaluable in sectors like finance, where data security is of utmost importance. By leveraging SLMs, organizations can enhance their security measures and protect sensitive information. Moreover, SLMs provide a stepping stone for engineers to adapt to new technologies and incorporate AI into their work, ultimately improving user experiences. On the other hand, LLMs encompass a wide range of knowledge, making them incredibly versatile. These models have the potential to transform industries by providing insights, predictions, and solutions to complex problems. With advancements in AI chip technology by tech giants like Apple, Nvidia, Google, and Meta, LLMs are becoming even more powerful and efficient. Evaluating AI models based on factors like stability and industry support is crucial to harnessing the full potential of LLMs. The conversation also addresses some ethical questions related to AI implementation. While AI brings numerous benefits, concerns about job displacement cannot be ignored. As AI continues to evolve, it is essential to strike a balance between automation and human involvement. Engineers must focus on improving AI sophistication and seamless integration into user interactions, ensuring that AI enhances human capabilities rather than replacing them. Additionally, ethical guidelines and regulations must be established to address potential biases and ensure responsible AI implementation. Download this episode here....

Apr 23, 2024

2 mins

Engineering Leadership

You Can’t Mentor Junior and Senior Engineers the Same with Dan DiGangi

In this episode of the Engineering Leadership series, Dan Gigangi shed light on the crucial role that engineering leaders play in promoting a culture of learning within their organizations, focusing on the importance of adapting communication styles, expanding impact beyond coding, setting long-term visions, and navigating the challenges of transitioning from technical roles to leadership positions. One of the key points emphasized by Dan Gigangi is the significance of adapting communication styles to cater to different skill levels. Effective communication is essential for fostering collaboration and ensuring that complex technical concepts are understood by all team members. By tailoring their communication approaches, engineering leaders can bridge the gap between varying levels of expertise, creating a cohesive and productive work environment. Dan highlights the need for senior engineers to make a broader impact beyond coding. While technical expertise is undoubtedly important, engineering leaders should encourage their team members to think beyond their immediate tasks and consider the larger organizational goals. By empowering senior engineers to take on leadership roles and contribute to strategic decision-making, leaders can foster a culture of innovation and drive long-term success. The conversation between Dan Gigangi and Tracy Lee also emphasizes the importance of setting long-term visions and executing strategic plans for career progression. Engineering leaders should guide their team members in envisioning their professional goals and provide guidance on how to achieve them. By creating a roadmap, leaders can inspire their team members to continuously learn and grow, ultimately driving their own career advancement and contributing to the success of the organization. Dan also discusses the challenges and pitfalls of transitioning from technical roles to leadership positions. While technical expertise is a solid foundation, engineering leaders must also develop non-technical skills such as communication, relationship-building, and strategic thinking. This transition requires a shift in mindset and the ability to navigate complex organizational dynamics. By recognizing and addressing these challenges, aspiring leaders can better prepare themselves for the demands of leadership roles. Download this episode here....

Apr 11, 2024

2 mins

Engineering Leadershipnpm

Understanding Vue.js's <Suspense> and Async Components

In this blog post, we will delve into how and async components work, their benefits, and practical implementation strategies to make your Vue.js applications more efficient and user-friendly. Without further ado, let’s get started! Suspense Let's kick off by explaining what Suspense components are. They are a new component that helps manage how your application handles components that need to await for some async resource to resolve, like fetching data from a server, waiting for images to load, or any other task that might take some time to complete before they can be properly rendered. Imagine you're building a web page that needs to load data from a server, and you have 2 components that fetch the data you need as they will show different things. Typically, you might see a loading spinner or a skeleton while the data is being fetched. Suspense components make it easier to handle these scenarios. Instead of manually managing loading states and error messages for each component that needs to fetch data, Suspense components let you wrap all these components together. Inside this wrapper, you can define: 1. What to show while the data is loading (like a loading spinner). 2. The actual content that should be displayed once the data is successfully fetched. This way, Vue Suspense simplifies the process of handling asynchronous operations (like data fetching) and improves the user (and the developer) experience by providing a more seamless and integrated way to show loading states and handle errors. There are two types of async dependencies that can wait on: - Components with an async setup() hook. This includes components using with top-level await expressions. *Note: These can only be used within a component.* - Async Components. Async components Vue's asynchronous components are like a smart loading system for your web app. Imagine your app as a big puzzle. Normally, you'd put together all the pieces at once, which can take time. But what if some pieces aren't needed right away? Asynchronous components help with this. Here's how they work: - Load Only What's Needed: Just like only picking up puzzle pieces you need right now, asynchronous components let your app load only the parts that are immediately necessary. Other parts can be loaded later, as needed. - Faster Start: Your app starts up faster because it doesn't have to load everything at once. It's like quickly starting with the border of a puzzle and filling in the rest later. - Save Resources: It uses your web resources (like internet data) more wisely, only grabbing what’s essential when it's essential. In short, asynchronous components make your app quicker to start and more efficient, improving the overall experience for your users. Example: ` Combining Async Components and Suspense Let's explore how combining asynchronous components with Vue's Suspense feature can enhance your application. When asynchronous components are used with Vue's Suspense, they form a powerful combination. The key point is that async components are "suspensable" by default. This means they can be easily integrated with Suspense to improve how your app handles loading and rendering components. When used together, you can do the following things: - Centralized Loading and Error Handling: With Suspense, you don't have to handle loading and error states individually for each async component. Instead, you can define a single loading indicator or error message within the Suspense component. This unified approach simplifies your code and ensures consistency across different parts of your app. - Flexible and Clean Code Structure: By combining async components with Suspense, your code becomes more organized and easier to maintain. An asynchronous component has the flexibility to operate independently of Suspense's oversight. By setting suspensible: false in its options, the component takes charge of its own loading behavior. This means that instead of relying on Suspense to manage when it appears, the component itself dictates its loading state and presentation. This option is particularly useful for components that have specific loading logic or visuals they need to maintain, separate from the broader Suspense-driven loading strategy in the application. In practice, this combo allows you to create a user interface that feels responsive and cohesive. Users see a well-timed loading indicator while the necessary components are being fetched, and if something goes wrong, a single, well-crafted error message is displayed. It's like ensuring that the entire puzzle is either revealed in its completed form or not at all rather than showing disjointed parts at different times. How it works When a component inside the boundary is waiting for something asynchronous, shows fallback content. This fallback content can be anything you choose, such as a loading spinner or a message indicating that data is being loaded. Example Usage Let’s use a simple example: In the visual example provided, imagine we have two Vue components: one showcasing a selected Pokémon, Eevee, and a carousel showcasing a variety of other Pokémon. Both components are designed to fetch data asynchronously. Without , while the data is being fetched, we would typically see two separate loading indicators: one for the Eevee Pokemon that is selected and another for the carousel. This can make the page look disjointed and be a less-than-ideal user experience. We could display a single, cohesive loading indicator by wrapping both components inside a boundary. This unified loading state would persist until all the data for both components—the single Pokémon display and the carousel—has been fetched and is ready to be rendered. Here's how you might structure the code for such a scenario: ` Here, is the component that's performing asynchronous operations. While loading, the text 'Loading...' is displayed to the user. Great! But what about when things don't go as planned and an error occurs? Currently, Vue's doesn't directly handle errors within its boundary. However, there's a neat workaround. You can use the onErrorCaptured() hook in the parent component of to catch and manage errors. Here's how it works: ` If we run this code, and let’s say that we had an error selecting our Pokemon, this is how it is going to display to the user: The error message is specifically tied to the component where the issue occurred, ensuring that it's the only part of your application that shows an error notification. Meanwhile, the rest of your components will continue to operate and display as intended, maintaining the overall user experience without widespread disruption. This targeted error handling keeps the application's functionality intact while indicating where the problem lies. Conclusion stands out as a formidable feature in Vue.js, transforming the management of asynchronous operations into a more streamlined and user-centric process. It not only elevates the user experience by ensuring smoother interactions during data loading phases but also enhances code maintainability and application performance. I hope you found this blog post enlightening and that it adds value to your Vue.js projects. As always, happy coding and continue to explore the vast possibilities Vue.js offers to make your applications more efficient and engaging!...

Apr 24, 2024

6 mins

VueWeb PerformanceUXJavaScript

Intro to EdgeDB - The 10x ORM

Intro to EdgeDB - The 10x ORM I’ve written a couple of posts recently covering different TypeScript ORMs. One about Prisma, and another about Drizzle. ORM’s are a controversial topic in their own right - some people think they are evil, and others think they are great. I enjoy them quite a bit. They make it easy to interact with your databases. What is more important and magical for an application than data? SQL without an ORM is amazing as well, but there are some pain points with that approach. Today I’m excited to write about EdgeDB, which isn’t _exactly_ an ORM or a database from my perspective (although they call themselves one). It is, however an incredibly impressive piece of technology that solves these common pain points in a pretty novel way. So if it’s not an ORM or a database, what exactly is it? I don’t think I can answer that in one or two sentences, so we will explore the various pieces that make up EdgeDB in this article. From a high-level standpoint, though, an interface/query language that sits in front of PostgreSQL. This may seem like some less important implementation detail, but in my eyes, it’s a feature and one of the most compelling selling points. Data Modeling EdgeDB advertises itself as a “graph-relational database”. The core components of EdgeDB data modeling are the schema, type system, and relationship definitions. A schema will consist of objects that contain various typed attributes and links that connect the objects. In SQL, a table is analogous to an Object, and a foreign-key is associated with a link. Here’s what a simple schema in EdgeDB looks like ` There’s a few things to highlight here * We defined two different objects (tables) User and Post * Each object contains properties with their types defined * str is one of several scalar types (bool, int, float, json, datetime, etc) * the author property is a required link to the User object Defining relations / associations In our example above we defined a one-to-many relationship between a user and posts. All the relation types that you can define in traditional SQL are available. One interesting feature though is called backward links. These can be defined in your schema and it allows you to access related data from both sides of a relationship. ` likes are a many-to-many relationship between Tweet and User. With a backlink defined multi link likers := Tweet.<likes[is User]; - we can access likes from a User and likers from a Tweet. ` That's how we can access these relations in our queries. You might be looking at these queries and thinking it looks a lot like GraphQL. This is why they call it a ‘Graph-relational’ database. We’ve only scratched the surface of EdgeDB schema’s. Hopefully, I’ve at least managed to pique your interest. Computed properties Computed properties are a super powerful feature that can be added to your schema or queries. This example user schema creates a computed discriminator and username property. The discriminator uses an EdgeDB standard library function to generate a discriminator number and the username property is a combination between the name and discriminator properties. ` Globals and Access Policies EdgeDB allows you to define global variables as part of your schema. The most common use case I’ve seen for this is to power the access policy feature. You can define a global variable as part of your schema: global current_user: uuid; With a global variable defined, you can provide the value as a sort of context from your application by providing it into your EdgeDB driver/client. ` You can then add access policies directly to your schema, for example, to provide fine-grained access control to blog posts in your blogging application. ` Aside from access policies, you can use your global variables in your queries as well. For example, if you wanted a query to select the current user. ` Types and Sets EdgeDB is very type-centric. All of your data is strongly typed. We’ve touched on some of the types already. * Scalars - There are a lot of scalar types available out of the box * Custom scalars - Custom scalar types are user-defined extensions of existing types * Enums - Are supported out of the box - enum<Admin, Moderator, Member> * Arrays - Defined by passing the singular value type - array<str>; * Tuples - In EdgeD, tuples can contain more than 2 elements and come in named and unnamed varieties - <str, number>; tuple<name: str, jersey_number: float64, active: bool>; All queries return a Set which is a collection of values of a given type. In the query language, all values are Sets. Sets are a collection of values of a given type. A comma-separated list of values inside a set of {curly braces}. A query with no results will return an empty or singleton set. If we have no User values stored yet - select User returns {}. Paired with the query language types and set provides an incredibly powerful and expressive system for interacting with your data. If you thought TypeScript was cool, wait until you start writing EdgeQL! 🙂 EdgeQL Now to the fun stuff: the query language. We’ll use a schema from the docs and start by looking at some of those queries and build on those. The example schema has an abstract type Person with two sub-types based on it Hero and Villian. This is known as a polymorphic type in EdgeDB. The Movie type includes a 1:m association with Person ` Selecting properties / data Before we dig into some real queries we should just touch on how we select actual data from a query. It’s pretty obvious and GraphQL-like but worth mentioning. To specify properties to select, you attach a shape. This works for getting nested link / association data as well. Based on our schema, here’s how we could select fields from Movie, including data from the collection of related characters. ` There is also a feature called a splats that allows you to select all fields and/or all linked fields without specifying them individually. ` If you don’t specify any properties or splats, only id’s get returned select Movie; . Adding some objects with insert To get started, we can use insert to add objects to our database. We’ll start big by looking at the nested insert example. This example is interesting because it shows the creation of two objects in a single query. You’ll notice the simplicity of the syntax. Even though this is the first EdgeQL query we’re looking at, in my experience, it’s like this across the board. I’ve found EdgeQL queries to be simple and intuitive to the point where I’ve been able to intuit how to accomplish things in my head without having to reference the docs or ask the AI. This example adds a new Villian and a new Hero which gets assigned as a link or association to the nemesis field on our Villian. To accomplish this we see that we can nest queries by wrapping them in (). ` The next example is pretty similar, but instead of creating the linked property, we are select ing and adding several potential objects to the characters list of Movie since it is a multi link. This is a pretty complex query that is doing a lot of different things. It’s deceivingly succinct. To accomplish the same thing with SQL this would probably be about 3 different queries. This query finds the objects to add to the characters multi link by filtering on a collection of different strings to match against the name property. ` The last thing we’ll cover for insert is bulk inserts. This is particularly useful for things like seed scripts. In this example, you can just imagine that you have a JSON array of objects with hero names that gets passed in as an argument to your query ` Querying data with select We’ve already seen subqueries and a select in the last section where we found a collection of Person records with a filter. We’ll build on that and see what tools are available to us when it comes to querying data. This one covers a lot of ground. Very similar to SQL we have order and limit, and offset operators to support sorting and pagination. Also there is a whole standard library of functions and operators like count that can be used in our queries. This example returns a collection of villian names, excluding the first and last result. ` Most commonly, you will want to filter by an id ` Here’s another common example filtering by datetime. Since we’re using a string value here we need to cast it to the EdgeDB datetime type. ` You get a pretty similar toolbox to SQL when it comes to filtering with your common operators and things. Combined with all the tools in the standard library, you can get pretty creative with it. Changing values and links with update The update..filter..set statement is how we can update existing data with EdgeQL. set is followed by a shape with assignments of properties to be updated. ` You can replace links for an object ` or add additional ones ` An even more interesting example is removing links matched on a type. Since Villian is a sub-type of Person , this query will remove all characters linked of the Villian type. ` Deleting objects with delete Deleting is pretty straight forward. Using the delete command you can just filter for the objects that you would like to remove. ` When the EdgeQL pieces fall into place As you become more familiar with the EdgeQL query language chances are you’ll start writing very complex queries fluently because everything just makes sense once you’ve learned the building blocks. Domain and business concerns I don’t think they explicitly mention this as a goal anywhere but it’s something that I picked up on pretty quickly. EdgeDB nudges you to move more of what might have traditionally been application logic into your database layer. This is a topic that can bring a lot of division since even things like foreign keys and constraints in SQL are frowned upon in some circles. EdgeDB goes as far as providing constraints, global variables, contexts, and authorization support built into the database. I think that the ability to bake some of these concerns into your EdgeDB Schema is great. The way you model your schema and database in EdgeDB map to your domain in a much more intuitive way where domain concerns don’t really feel out of place there. Database Clients and Query Builders and Generators We’ve covered a lot so far to highlight what EdgeDB is and how to handle common use cases with the query language. To use it in your project though, you will need a client/driver library. There are clients available in several different languages. The one that they clearly have put the most investment into is the TypeScript query builder. We’ll briefly look at both options: simple driver/client and query builder. Whichever you end up choosing you will need to instantiate a driver and make sure you have a connection to your database instance configured. Basic client Although the TS query builder is very popular and pretty amazing, I couldn’t get away from just writing EdgeQL queries. In my application, I composed queries using template strings, and it worked great. The clients all have a set of methods available for passing in EdgeQL queries and parameters. querySingle is a method for queries where you are only expecting a single result. If your query will have multiple results you would use query instead. There is also a queryRequiredSingle which will throw an error if no results are found. There are some other methods available as well including one for running queries in a transaction ` The first argument is the query, and the second is a map of parameters. In this example we include the title parameter and it is accessed in our query via $title. TypeScript query builder If you have a TypeScript app and type-safety is important, you might prefer using the query builder. It is a pretty incredible feat of TypeScript magic initially developed by the same developer behind the popular library Zod. We can’t cover it in very much depth here but we’ll look at an example just to have an idea of what the query builder looks like in an application. ` The query builder is able to infer the result type automatically. It knows which fields you’ve selected, it knows that the result will be a single item. Query generator There are generators for queries and types. So even if you opt out of using the query builder you can still have queries that are strongly typed. It’s nice to have this option if you want to just write your queries as EdgeQL in .edgeql files. ` We end up with an exported function named getUser that is strongly typed. ` Tools and Utilities The team at EdgeDB puts a big emphasis on developer experience. It shows up all over the place. We’ve already seen some utilities with the generators that are available. There are some other tools available as well that help complete the entire experience. EdgeDB CLI The first and most important tool to mention is the CLI. If you’ve started using EdgeDB then you’ve most likely already installed and used it. The CLI is pretty extensive. It includes commands for things like migrations, managing EdgeDB versions and installations, managing projects and local/cloud database instances, dumps and restores, a repl, and more. The CLI makes managing EdgeDB a breeze. Admin UI The CLI includes a command to launch an admin UI for any project or database. The Admin UI includes a awesome interactive diagram of your database schema, a repl for running queries, and a table to inspect and make changes to the data stored in your database. Summary Adopting newer database technology is a tough sales pitch. Replacing your application’s database technology at any point in its lifecycle is not a problem that anyone wants to have. This is one of the reasons why EdgeDB being a superset of PostgreSQL is a huge feature in my opinion. The underlying database technology is tried and true, and EdgeDB is open-source. Based on this, I would feel confident using EdgeDB if it aligned well from a technical and business perspective. We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post. EdgeDB is feature-packed and powerful. Databases is a tough nut to crack, and I commend the team for all their hard work to help continue pushing forward one of the most important components of almost any application. I’m typically pretty conservative when it comes to databases, but EdgeDB took a great approach, in my opinion. I recommend at least giving it a try. You might catch the EdgeDB bug like I did!...

Apr 26, 2024

11 mins

JavaScriptEdgeDB

Detoxify Your Team Culture with Angela Nelms

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