Automated database migrations have been a convenient way of dealing with schema changes for a long time in Django. It’s been only 3 years since migrations have been incorporated into Django but South had been the de-facto solution since 2008.

The same way an ORM allows us to forget about SQL when writing queries to the database, migrations make sure we don’t write a single ‘ALTER TABLE’ in our schema changes. Some may argue that’s bad: we “lose control” over a critical part of our infrastructure, we don’t know how to write SQL anymore when needed, we’re not sure how that operation is really translated into SQL, etc, etc. Ok, these points are actually valid. However, Django migrations module is more than just a way of automatically generating and applying SQL statements, it’s also a transparent API to write your own database changes in Python. It comes with wheels for those who need it (or trust enough) and tools for those who like to get their hands dirty.

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Have you ever wanted to prototype a RESTful API, integrate Internet services or IoT devices in a few minutes without having to learn how to use several APIs and libraries? Here you go.

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The dev team at Cheesecake Labs has been using VIPER for iOS and Android mobile app development for over one year and we just love this clean architecture!

This article summarizes our best practices on the VIPER architecture, using code examples from our VIPER boilerplate. The code samples used here are in Swift, but all concepts mentioned may be applied to an Android project developed with VIPER, either using Java or Kotlin.

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When we start the development of a product, there is always a desire to make it as perfect as possible: fulfilling client’s expectations, offering a good learning opportunity to the developer and delivering a system with high maintainability and scalability.

As the code base grows, keeping it problem-free becomes a harder challenge. Testing manually each module of the application can take so much time that developers may become unproductive.

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Starting as an Android developer and later working with iOS as well, I had contact with several different projects’ architectures – some good and some bad.

I was happily using the MVP architecture for Android until I met – and worked eight months with – the VIPER architecture in an iOS project. When I came back to Android, I decided to adapt and implement VIPER on it, despite some other devs suggesting it wouldn’t make sense to use an iOS architecture on Android. Given the fundamental difference between Android and iOS’ frameworks, I had some questions about how useful would VIPER be for Android. Would it be doable and worth the effort? Let’s start with the basics.

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As a JavaScript developer, we should know that most things are objects – from core features, like strings and arrays, to the browser’s APIs. Here you can have a full introduction about objects in JavaScript.
JS’s objects are so beautiful: we can copy them, change and remove properties and do many cool things.

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If you are not considering the user experience when designing a new mobile application, it’s time to start thinking about it. One of the most important things to have in mind when you design a mobile app is making sure that it is useful and intuitive for the users. If it’s not useful, it won’t have a practical value. At the same time, if the application is useful, but it takes too much time and effort to be used, people won’t engage with it.

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Defining the personas that represent the audience of a product is a very important step of the design process. There are many methods out there to help us figure them out. But the question is: do we empathize with them the way we should?

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As a software developer, I know how hard it is to contain the urge to start coding as soon as we can. After the first sprint planning, our fingers – uncontrolled, hungry creatures – want to start smashing the keyboard, translating our ideas into code fastly and furiously.

Despite how great we feel while developing, it’s always a good idea to take a step back, especially when building something that could be used by many different users – like an API is. A. In this post, I’ll show you why and how to design a properly-thought API.

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Yes, you read it right. I took the liberty to adapt Daft Punk’s song title to talk about code review. As I write this, I’m wondering  if it is going to pass the thorough examination of the chief editor, but I like how the title sounds (and it really describes how a Pull Request should be). And you see, even this harmless piece of text is going over a rvesoin revision process before you can have the chance to be struck by my insights, so why shouldn’t we do the same with our code?

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