Parsing JSON files made easy

Published: 04/12/2018

In JavaScript land I’ve discovered a neat tool to help you parse JSON easier and faster. I’m going to give you a sample of a JSON, I need you to parse the JSON and give me a array of all students names.

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Deploying a Node.JS application to Azure

Published: 04/02/2018

My new job has taken me to interesting new adventures. This job has introduced me to the fun of trying to get Node.JS and other open source tools to work with the latest versions of Windows.

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Surprise! Time to dust off the resume!

Published: 03/30/2018

It’s been a little over a month since I last blogged, and an eventful month it has been. During my absence I rediscovered the joys of searching for a new job, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

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Contract driven testing is the best testing

Published: 02/19/2018

I love testing. I’ve always been a big fan of testing, but in the last 5 years, I’ve seen a lot of really terrible tests written. Today I’m going to explain to you the levels of testing I believe are most useful.

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Most meetings suck: How to re-factor team meetings

Published: 02/16/2018

Most meetings suck. The person running them doesn’t actually run the meeting. They’re collections of random people unfocused, collectively wasting time for little or no purpose. How do we make meetings more effective and not waste time?

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It's time to refactor your retrospective

Published: 02/09/2018

I love retrospectives. They give the team a chance to reflect, to learn, and to really bond. Our retrospectives are the highlight of my sprint. I love doing them. Our format is quite different than you would expect from a typical scrum retro.

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Being So Good They Can't Ignore You

Published: 02/04/2018

Today, I just finished the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. I listened through Audible and I have to say it’s extremely remarkable in terms of how it affects my career thoughts.

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Module aliases in React using Webpack

Published: 01/22/2018

For my big rewrite project I’m working on, I decided it was time to start referencing modules by an alias instead of a relative or absolute path. It has a bunch of different modules, from the Redux store to an API service that almost every component or action consumed in some way. Figuring out the file path to the store or other common services was a chore.

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Redux Demystified

Published: 01/11/2018

Today we’re going to look at Redux. Redux is a popular tool to use with React. We’re going to explore the topic and talk about why you should consider using it.

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Developer Happiness: Gratitude as an attitude

Published: 01/03/2018

It’s a new year and many of us will soon set then forget our new year’s resolutions. One of the challenges I have personally is to maintain a grateful and content attitude. In this field we get to experience some of the best perks of the modern life: the internet, building cool stuff, working for cool companies, and cool rewards like big paychecks.

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Welcome to Pro Dev Mentor!

Published: 12/19/2017

Welcome to Pro Dev Mentor! I’m Adam Bourg. I’m a software engineer with more than a decade of technical experience. I’m currently working as a team lead building the future of TV. I am passionate about building and supporting Agile teams to deliver high quality software. As I began working in the field, I noticed the lack of software engineering professional development opportunities beyond how to work with the trendiest technology.

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Bash Hacking to add easy interface to Jekyll for creating blog posts

Published: 03/17/2017

I’m a big fan of command line tools, I live by the command line, I do my job by the command line. I hate with a passionate fire, copying and pasting text. When I switched to Jekyll for my blog, I decided I needed a command line tool to generate the blog posts in the correct format so I can get layout, title and the correct file name structure.

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You're up and running!

Published: 03/16/2017

Welcome to my new blog running on github pages with Jekyll, Switching from Wordpress to this for the easier content management and no hosting feeds.

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Growth Mindset

Published: 04/18/2016

My wife is a public school teacher, she teaches students who have special needs. She teaches a lot of students with learning disabilities and one thing she focuses with her students on a concept called “Growth Mindset”.

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Private Data in Javascript

Published: 04/11/2016

One of the things that I feel is really missing from the JavaScript programming language is the option of private data and private behavior (methods) to an object. I never could get data that an outside caller couldn’t see. That is until I discovered the JavaScript closure.

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Scrum is the new waterfall (REVISED)

Published: 02/09/2016

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten a TON of feedback from my post in November, “Scrum is the new waterfall”. Some of the feedback was good and others really thought my perspective is extremely negative.

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Live and die by the keyboard: How to be more productive!

Published: 01/28/2016

I live and die by the keyboard. The keyboard is my friend and it’s way faster to use an application using a keyboard then it is to use a mouse. In fact there are many studies that show that for non-complex key combinations keyboard shortcuts and aliases are much faster then using the mouse.

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