Integrating apps and servers is not an easy task, we all know that. Even with great tools like Alamofire and Retrofit there are still a lot of things to take care of in the app side: different endpoints, encoding / decoding JSON strings, API versions, data consistency and so on…

Recently I have worked in a project with server integration and we had the opportunity to choose new technologies to work with and to try to avoid some of these problems. The choice was a GraphQL server and in the app side the Apollo framework.

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Picture this: 5 people talking about the same subject in different languages. What are the chances of misunderstanding? As you can imagine: a lot. Well, this is a common scenario in software development teams up to some point. One of the most common reasons that lead to failure when building a product is the lack of well defined goals and requirements amongst developers and stakeholders. This can be caused by a wide variety of reasons. But it is safe to agree that most of them are due to lack of communication.

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This post was originally written as an internal article on Cheesecake Labs’ wiki. It merges (no pun intended) pull request practices from many different cultures and backgrounds into a definitive workflow. We will discuss why you should have a guide for managing your PR lifecycle, as well as tips on how to accomplish that.

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If you’re either a UI designer or a developer, you’ve probably heard of Sketch in the past years – or maybe you’re even using it. Sketch has become a very popular software and broadly used by UI designers. In this article, I’ll show some steps of my workflow when creating and exporting assets to mobile or web applications.

I hope that this article will be useful for designers starting to use Sketch or developers who need to export assets from a Sketch file. If you’re already experienced with Sketch, you’ll probably be familiar with most of the things I’ll be presenting, but you can still get some good insights from this article.

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In the past few years, websites have evolved into complex web applications, and what once was land of simple business informative pages, now is home to Facebook, Slack, Spotify and Netflix, changing the way you communicate, listen to music or watch movies. Front-end development has reached a new level and now requires more attention than it used to.

Just as for many front-end developers, our stack used to consist of HTML and jQuery. We would do AJAX requests to our backend, render the new chunk of UI on JavaScript and insert it into the DOM. User actions were tracked by binding events and callbacks to each of the elements. And don’t take me wrong: this is just fine for most applications.

However, when an application grows considerably, a couple of issues start being more frequent than expected: you forget to update all places where a value is displayed in the UI, no events are bound to the content added by AJAX, just to name some — this list can be very long. These are signs that your code is not maintainable, especially when developing together with a team. Using a front-end framework provides a formal way to write collaborative code that you can read, write and update.

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