Posts

Tips for technical interviews

Among the many services we offer to our customers, we help them improve the way they conduct technical interviews in their search for developers. Everybody is looking for developers, for senior developers to be precise. We do conduct interviews too, all the people working at Lean Mind went through our process at some point. There are at least two interviews, one that is non-technical with the aim to get to know the candidates, their values, dreams and aspirations, as well as communication skills.

The importance of giving and receiving feedback

These last few weeks I’ve been reading a book related to feedback to learn more about this topic. The book is called Smart Feedback and their authors are Jane Rodriguez, Rosa Rodriguez and Noemi Vico. I would like to share what I have learned and how important it is to give and receive feedback both on a personal and organizational level. As people, we have different experiences, perceptions and histories and the truth is that many times we take all this as a basis to relate to others and deliver a judgment or opinion.

AndroidSecurityConfig for local development and useful commands

In one of the projects we have been working on for the last months we’ve been working on both mobile development (native Android) and web development, creating a backend and a front end application. Basically, the mobile app sends messages via POST request to the backend, where they are stored, so they can be displayed in the frontend dashboard we created as well. Android does not trust unsecure connections (HTTP instead of HTTPS) by default.

Configuring a Zoom meeting room for the team

At the time of this writing, Zoom is definitely our preferred choice when it comes to videoconferencing. It’s been our choice for the last two years or so. Something that works very well for every team/project is to configure a Zoom room that is permanently open so that any team member may pop up at anytime and find the others.

Dear reader, this website does not track you

The cookie warning notice is really annoying, specially when you don’t have other choice than accepting them to read a website. Moreover, if you value privacy what is even more annoying is to be tracked everywhere you go on the Internet.

Functional Operators

Array Refactoring Patterns You may have probably heard of functional programming many times, however, if you are starting in the world of development or you come from object oriented programming, you will not know with certainty what it is about. Let’s begging with a basic definition, since the aim of this term is creating a functionality based on programming methods, it receives a few entries params, in order to return a value, at this stage it doesn’t exist side effects, it means that values are immutable.

Why you should use ArchUnit

Once upon a time, there was a legacy project. One can see the right architectural design patterns shaped into the application’s modules. The domain held the correct logic. The interaction with the database and system inputs were appropriately encapsulated. However, once you start digging into the code, several features spread the logic across all layers: There were database entities in the Controllers, Transactions everywhere, incorrect use of the ORM with hardcoded SQL, cyclic dependencies, etc.

Code with me - Plugin pairing for IntelliJ

Code with me is a new functionality that JetBrains has recently brought like a novelty to IntelliJ. It is a plugin that allows us to pair programming with more than one partner, as if we were writing in Google Docs in a collaborative way.

Is Git the best VCS ever?

Git has become the software industry de facto standard version control system. It was created by Linus Torvalds to support the singular development of the Linux Kernel, however it has been adopted by most open source projects as well as the corporate world. Does that mean it’s the best tool ever?

The big impact of the small coding decisions

Maintainable code requires the programmers to make conscious decisions about code design at the smallest level, because the code is not ruined in a single day but over time, when unconscious or bad decisions are made day after day.

Lean Mind's School

Since the very beginning, Lean Mind have been collaborating with local universities and high education institutions in the education of young developers. We take interns for a few months to help them learn coding practices and principles as well as soft skills. They are required to spend around three months in a company they choose in order to get their degree. This happens once or twice a year.

Workshop: Inner Team Talent Tools

We are happy to count on Rosa Elvira Gonzalez as our psychologist and coach at Lean Mind. She’s been running workshops and team activities for us since the beginning of our company. From team building activities to emotional intelligence training, one-on-one meetings and much more.

Organising test fixtures with Gradle

It’s recommended to separate integration tests from unit tests for several reasons. One is to shorten the feedback loop as the unit tests run way faster. In the case of a Java project using Gradle, it’s very common to split the project into multiple sub-projects, such as, common, model, application …

Given this configuration, it could be difficult to have a helper class used by the unit and integration tests in the various sub-projects. As this is a test helper, we are not interested on having it next to the production code and we don’t want to copy the class to several sub-projects.

The Lucky Organiser: SoCraTes Canaries (Socracan) 2020

When I first met Carlos in 2003 and he repaired my computer (it was part of his job at that time), I told him that he had to be proud of working on what he had been studying for… He explained me that he was not and I learned that a computer engineer is not the one who fixes the household appliances… Although I still blame him when the router doesn’t work or the karaoke crashes haha.

Mocking Functional React Components

Most of the time you either mount the component including all its inner components in order to test it or instantiate a shallow version of it. Sometimes however you need a mix, mounting the component for real except for one piece. This is when you need to mock out an inner component to spy on it or stub it’s behaviour.

Testing Functional React Components

React Hooks is simplifying the way we handle state and logic within our components. I am glad I don’t need Redux’s complexity to implement simple components that perform simple tasks. The new React (from v16.8) is easier to test than ever, although there are so many approaches to testing and so many tools out there. What is your favourite strategy? In this post we tell you mine.

Answers to your questions on TDD and testing

I published my humble book on TDD in Spanish nine years ago. I started writing it around this time, ten years ago. I definitely want to publish an updated revision of the book fixing the many mistakes I made into it, using examples that are more concise and even using JavaScript for some of them rather than C#.

How is it like to work at Lean Mind

We all look for a rewarding job, although we have different definitions of what that means. For me, the most rewarding job I’ve been in so far is the one I’m in right now and I’d like to share why I feel this way when working with this great team.

Deno is the new Node?

About 3 months ago, Ryan Dahl (the inventor of Node.js) gave a talk in JSConf called “10 Things I Regret About Node.js”, were he regrets several design decisions he took over Node.js. About during the half of his talk, he showed us an experimental prototype called Deno that aimed to fix Node.js problems.

Testing RxJS Observables with Marble Diagrams

Testing RxJS might be a hard task, specially when we have a complex pipeline with lots of time assertions. In this article we’ll explore how can we make these tests easier to reason about using Marble Diagrams, but first:

Test Driven Development from inside

What follows is a small summary of three great days at the #Leanmind offices in the ITER (Instituto de Tecnología y Energías Renovables) at Tenerife, Canary Islands.