#1 If clients avoid negotiating pay from the beginning, leave — Remember when you closed your first business deal? Ah — the good ol’ times. For most of us that work in the side-hustle world, I’m sure you have realized that your first clients can either make or break you. It is especially true in the services sector. Whether you are…

The comprehensive guide for a custom integration testing solution using xUnit and Docker in Azure Pipelines — Functioning end-to-end tests are one of the most consequential things you can have for your application. But making end-to-end tests are not as simple as making unit tests because it can be an amalgamation of unit tests and integration tests. You would need to spin up your testing environment, and…

How to leverage persistent layers for atomic transactions with guaranteed delivery — This article is a two-part series about how to engineer live data replication architectures using SQL triggers, and the outbox pattern. You can read part one here. Let’s not sugarcoat it, software engineering as a profession is mostly about data plumbing — there I said it. I am reiterating a…

A step-by-step guide to how to add stress tests inside your CI pipeline — There are a slew of tests an application has to pass before it is cleared for production. From unit tests to performance tests, each is as important as the rest. On March 31, 2020, Azure DevOps officially retired its cloud-based Apache JMeter load testing tool. …

Demystifying MultiBlocProviders while making a great user experience in the process. — Flutter has taken the world by storm. More people are migrating to it and more corporations are using it to build their apps. The reason behind the migration is not Flutter itself but rather the ecosystem maturing in the last few years. If you have ever coded a Flutter app…

The process of applying stoicism in everyday life. — The late author, Sir Terry Pratchett once said, “Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom”. This quote has resonated with me more as I am entering adulthood because I have started to notice things that my younger self wouldn’t. We like to get caught…

In a way, two of the best things you can learn are marketing and sales. — A few years back, I regularly volunteer for a non-profit organization in my university. The non-profit organization focuses on teaching children in Indonesia. More specifically, the ones who require tutoring and are being left behind at school. As you can imagine, the problems the children have don’t come from the…

A guide to how you should structure your service layer in Flutter. — Making large Flutter applications can be a pain if you don’t implement good design patterns. However, there are lots of design patterns made to solve this problem. One of these patterns is the Business Logic Component pattern or simply BLoC. But today, we are not going to talk about the…

Write better and more readable frontend APIs using Axios — Making frontend applications is not as simple as it used to be. Frontend frameworks like React and Vue.js rely heavily on APIs. This adds complexity to our app because we need to manage how we call these APIs. One solution is to simplify the process by writing clean API calls. …