Is our industry’s obsession with clean code setting us back

I’ve been in the software industry for 15+ years now, and as time goes on, I feel like I’m becoming increasingly delusional. As a fellow developer, I have been brainwashed by our industry’s rhetoric to believe everything is about writing “clean code”. You know what I’m talking about: Talk is cheap; show me the code!

We are not aware, but the problem starts when we are junior developers. We are eager to learn and often ask our senior peers for advice. We ask things like: What books do you recommend? Two of the most recommended books are Clean Code and The Pragmatic Programmer. These are both excellent books, and I believe everybody should read them. Both books share some of the same advice and try to teach us how to write better code and become better professionals. However, they have very different focus areas.

Among many...

In this post, we are going to learn how to implement customer support capabilities using a minimal code approach and relying on third party services. There are a lot of situations in which you might need to implement some customer support capabilities. Maybe you are developing your own product, or maybe you are working for a company that needs to improve their operations.

With the arrival of COVID-19, e-commerce has become a major concern for most businesses. Having a good customer support strategy in place is a must these days. Online consumers demand features like online live chat or multi-channel communication and expect high responsiveness from online businesses.

The pandemic has generated unprecedented levels of uncertainty for business and they need to be able to adapt in the shortest time possible. For this reason, we are going to really on third party services and use a...

We are very happy to announce that after many months of work the JSDayIE tickets are now on sale!

About a year ago we started to work on JSDayIE, the first JavaScript conference in Ireland.

Ireland has a huge developer community, in fact, Dublin has a very high developer ratio and it is the home of the EU HQ of many global software companies such as Microsoft, Google, Twitter or Airbnb.

However, for some strange reason, Ireland doesn’t have a conference dedicated to the web development community (A few years ago Ireland was home of the Web Summit but it moved to Lisbon). So we decided to make it happen and we announced JSDayIE.

We have already announced some of our speakers and other details at www.jsday.org. Please visit our site to learn more about the event.

The tickets start at 95 EUR + VAT and the conference takes place on Friday, September 20th, 2019. If you don’t live in...

The top priority for JSDayIE is the attendee experience, with great food, drinks, talks, swag, and community. JSDayIE is a one-day single-track conference hosted in The Round Room at The Mansion House, Dawson Street, Dublin.

JSDayIE carefully curates talks that inspire and inform the audience in an intimate feeling where each attendee has time to meet one another (only 350 tickets are available).

Compared to most conferences, JSDayIE sponsorship provides high-value authentic interactions with attendees for a relatively low investment. Sponsoring JSDayIE is a great way to contribute to the healthy growth of the JavaScript community in Ireland. Please join us in creating a fantastic experience for every attendee. Sponsoring offers a unique opportunity to expose your brand and find talent specialized in JavaScript technologies in Ireland.

1. Contribute to the healthy growth of the

The JSDayIE 2019 CFP is now open! We’re excited to welcome the JavaScript community to submit talks for JSDayIE 2019 that will take place on September 20th 2019. The Call for Proposals closes on April 15th, 2019.

We are looking for a multitude of topics and perspectives but most of all we value:

• Original topics, presented for the first time
• Practical ideas that attendees can apply at work the next day
• Trends and hot topics which are relevant in 2019 and beyond
• Fresh perspectives on the JS ecosystem

We don’t have a specific theme for JSDayIE. Instead, we’re aiming to select talks that are interesting for as many JavaScript developers as possible. Our audience skill level is intermediate to advanced.

All talks should be in English and 25 minutes long. We will be on a tight schedule and will enforce the time limits rigorously. We suggest that you time your presentation...

Welcome to the official announcement of JSDayIE 2019! We are very excited to introduce the very first JavaScript conference in Ireland.

JSDayIE 2019 is going to be a day dedicated to the JavaScript community in Ireland with over 450 attendees. The goal of the event is to bring together the JavaScript community for one day and showcase some of the best and most innovative work done by the members of the JavaScript community in Ireland.

JSDayIE is presented by Wolk Software. Wolk Software is an Ireland based startup dedicated to empowering developers and teams to achieve their best through consultancy and training services and technical publications and events.

JSDayIE 2019 will take place on September 20th, 2019 at The Round Room at the Mansion House in Dawson Street, right in the heart of Dublin.

JSDayIE is a single-track 1-day tech conference featuring talks from a diverse range...

In this post, I would like to discuss the importance of static types in functional programming languages and why TypeScript is a better option than JavaScript when it comes to functional programming due to the lack of a static type system in JavaScript.

Life without types in a functional programming code base

Please try to put your mind on a hypothetical situation so we can showcase the value of static types. Let’s imagine that you are writing some code for an elections-related application. You just joined the team, and the application is quite big. You need to write a new feature, and one of the requirements is to ensure that the user of the application is eligible to vote in the elections. One of the older members of the team has pointed out to us that some of the code that we need is already implemented in a module named @domain/elections and that we can import it as follows:

Over the past few days, I’ve been working on a React application. It is a straightforward application that doesn’t even require a database. However, I didn’t want to embed all the content into the application’s JSX because some of it will be updated frequently. So I decided to use a few simple JSON files to store the contents.

The application is the website for a conference, and I wanted to build a page that looks as follows:

To generate a page like the one in the previous image I have stored the data in the following JSON file:

[
    { "startTime": "08:00", "title": "Registration & Breakfast", "minuteCount": 60 },
    { "startTime": "09:00", "title": "Keynote", "minuteCount": 25 },
    { "startTime": "09:30", "title": "Talk 1 (TBA)", "minuteCount": 25 },
    { "startTime": "10:00", "title": "Talk 2 (TBA)", "minuteCount": 25 },
    { "startTime": "10:30", "title": "Talk 3 (TBA)",

A couple of days ago I finished reading Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri and, as usual, I would like to share a review with the community.

I picked up this book because the author was a speaker at an event in Ireland. I live in Ireland, and I ended up learning about her work through one of my friends (@dagonzago).

I checked out some of the work of Melissa Perri online, and after watching her talk Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri at Mind the Product, San Francisco, 2017 I decided to pre-order her book.

I’m a software engineer, not a product manager, product designer or product owner. However, the book is appealing to me because I find very interesting learning about why some companies and teams fail while others are incredibly successful. I enjoy learning about methodologies, practices or techniques that can increase the chances of an organization or team being...