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. This proves as a predicament because there will be no replacement for the tool and users have to self-host machines for load testing.

Developers from all around started to come out with their own solutions, from dockerized JMeter meant for load testing other containers to making their own dedicated servers and implementing load tests manually…

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, you might know of a library named Cubit. Cubit is a state management library that helps implement reactive programming. When building mobile apps, you need some kind of state management. Otherwise, your data will be all over the place.

But we will not be talking about Cubit at all today…

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 up in problems that don’t concern us. More problems today arose not because of what happened rather in how we choose to respond to the problem. Frankly, it is more so in the dividing nature of politics nowadays.

It is no wonder that stoicism is being more popular and being…

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 lack of resources alone but also from the lack of interest. “How can we make learning interesting?”, was the main predicament we were trying to solve daily.

The experience was full of ups and downs, and through it all, I learned a few key lessons that helped me shape my…

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 state management portion of an app. Rather, we will be talking about the service layer. Using BLoC only simplifies our state management and it doesn’t solve how we should handle the service layer. Our goal is to make the API calls as clean as possible.

A Clean Service Layer

How do you define a…

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.

But wait, what are “clean API calls”? To me, that means the proper structuring of API calls, making them easy to read and maintain. First, I do this by utilizing the single-responsibility principle. …

Consumerism is seen as a negative trend in most of today’s society. Because the behavior is associated with being pretentious, greedy, or even mindless. It doesn’t uphold the values of modesty and generosity. “Don’t buy what you don’t need.” is what most people would think when confronted with consumerism.

But what I would like to acknowledge is the fact that consumerism correlates with an important societal trait — Productivity. There is an interesting link between the two, sometimes even complements each other. …

In the old days, web applications were treated as one. There was no separation between frontend and backend apps — at least not like today. The reason was that back then, computers were not as powerful as they are today. Browsers used to rely on servers to render the frontend and return it as simple HTML. This technique is called server-side rendering. These kinds of mindsets are what gave rise to frameworks like ASP.NET Web Forms.

But as innovations in computing increased rapidly, modern computers became much more powerful than they used to be. …