We Are Writing

Reading time: ~15 minutes.

MobX (previously mobservable) is a state management library for JavaScript frontend application. This article introduces it with examples as well as showing how it works in a real app with TypeScript. It is based on a talk I gave at the Osaka Web designers and developers meetup recently.
»

Reading time: ~1 minute.

Back in March we announced Proppy, our tool to write beautiful proposals.

With all the excitement after releasing Proppy last week, we actually forgot to blog about it!
»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

We are very lucky as EU citizens to have access to 28 (well, soon 27 apparently) countries.
To give a bit of context to this blog post, We Are Wizards is currently a company based in the UK, founded by 2 French and one German, all living in London at the moment.

While this post tries to be general, it is guided by our own requirements. There might be inaccuracies in this article so don’t take my word for it and contact companies/government in the countries before making a decision if you decide to do so. We’ve added the tax rates so you can get a feel of the different options but they are not a deciding factor for us.
»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

Serving web requests should be fast and error free. There’s
some evidence
that slower pages result in less browsing.

We’ll discuss a few strategies to keep requests fast.
»

Hey everyone,

Together with the excellent Simone Trubian we are organising a second NixOs meetup in London the 3rd of May, in a space generously provided by skills matter.

This time we’re trying something different: A hands-on meeting. I will give a ~20 minute talk about the weird Nix language, and then we will apply our skills to add or update a package for NixOS.

Tickets are limited and you can grab them here.
»

Reading time: ~15 minutes.

Back in October 2015, I tried Rust for web services and found the ecosystem lacking at the time. That’s why I’ve been working on porting some of the tools we use in Proppy to Rust: jwt, bcrypt (granted that Argon2 seems superior) and a migration tool. While I mostly do SPAs these days and don’t write many templates in the backend, I still need one for some occasions. When using Python, I like Jinja2 and Django templates. Here’s how I attempted to port them to Rust and the result is Tera.
»

Reading time: ~5min

We released Proppy in beta last week.
Since this blog has a mostly technical following, I thought it would be interested in details about the stack and the data model.
»

Reading time: ~3 minutes.

At We Are Wizards we send out a fair number of proposals. In our early
days we developed a
command line tool to
generate consistent and error-free proposals – and this turned out to
be super useful.

We’ve taken our little tool and made it into a webapp so others can
benefit from this, too.
»

As we are working on our product (if you work in an agency, we’d love to have a chat with you! send us a mail at team AT wearewizards.io), I was curious to see the payments landscape in Europe, having read so much about #VATMESS.
»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

Continuing from the first part that introduced Flow, we are now going to have a look at TypeScript.

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to several targets, including ES5 and ES6. The current version of TypeScript (1.6 at the time of writing) now supports JSX, which was the main blocker for most people using React.
»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

As front-end applications grow in complexity, more and more developers are looking for ways to make development and maintenance more scalable.
For some people it means foregoing JavaScript itself and using languages such as Clojurescript, Elm or Purescript while others want to keep using JavaScript, especially now that ES6 makes writing it tolerable.

A simple way to make a codebase easier to maintain and to grow is to have types and that is exactly what Flow and TypeScript offer, albeit in different ways.
»

Reading time: ~20 minutes.

I really enjoyed reading how the phoenix-framework people managed to
get to
two million active websocket connections.

I’ve heard some very smart people say that Haskell has an amazing
runtime with very cheap threads. I have no reason to disbelieve them
but we thought it’d be fun to see how Haskell fares in a comparable
setup.

»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

After looking into Rust for webservices, I concluded that, while it was not mature enough yet in my opinion, the language itself is quite nice and I would be interested in writing more of it. So here it is, my first crate (the name for packages in Rust): jsonwebtoken (code on github).
»

We (Wizards) attended the London Python Code Dojo at Bank of America in Canary
Wharf on the first of October.

Find our report inside.
»

Reading time: ~15 minutes.

Developing web apps in dynamic languages is a breeze when using frameworks like Django for Python.
The downsides are that software written in dynamic languages is harder, at least in my opinion, to maintain, to refactor and you also need to write tests to cover potential errors that would simply not be possible with a compiler.
»

NixOps is a fantastic tool for
getting reproducible servers running in no time. NixOps can deploy to
many different targets including VirtualBox, Google’s GCE and Amazon’s
cloud services AWS.

As we have discovered
NixOps has the downside of storing all its state (such as the IP
address of a server) in a binary SQLite database. That in combination
with some defaults such as absolute paths make it a bit cumbersome to
share deployments. This post describes how to work around these
issues.

»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

In this article we are going to have a look at my preferred set of tools for writing React/Flux web apps.
If you don’t know React or Flux, you can finds their documentation at their respective websites: React, Flux.
»

I am assuming most readers of this blog know the benefits of password manager and how everyone should use one but for the few that don’t: they generate random, unique password and remember them for you, protecting you from leaks from poorly run websites such as the ones on Plain Text Offenders and just generally increasing security.
»

In this post I’m going to assume that
reproducibility is
good and necessary. There are
well-written articles
on how to do reproducible computational research so I don’t want to go
into that either.

Instead I want to focus on how researchers can run published source
code on their own machines and arrive at the same results.
»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

Last week my article Using Protobuf instead of JSON to communicate with a frontend ended up being number one on Hacker News and we saw a crazy amount of traffic coming on this blog.

I thought that it would be interesting to analyze some of that data so here it is.
»

Reading time: ~15 minutes.

Protocol buffers (or other binary serialization formats like Thrift) are widely used to communicate between services. JSON is overwhelmingly used for backend <-> frontend communication and for APIs.

Let’s see what a client/server using Protobuf would look like.
»

Reading time: ~15 minutes.

One of our client recently asked us to host and support their existing Django
application.
Although my usual tools for this kind of jobs are Ubuntu and
Ansible, I wanted to try the Nix
tools in a real project since Tom is an avid user.
»

Reading time: ~25 minutes.

I have lived in 4 countries on 3 continents (so far).

When people ask me about these places, the first thing that comes to my mind is the weather.
Having lived in these places I knew roughly how they compared but was curious about the exact numbers. What better way than to visualize data than a ipython notebook!
»

Reading time: ~5 minutes.

I’m a big fan of the amazing London design agency Berg. So when its
CEO Matt Berg tweeted this last year:

I’m after a London Python freelancer for a 2mo gig, Flask/tests/Redis/Bootstrap. Mail me… matt at interconnected dot org. Tell yr friends!

— Matt Webb (@genmon) November 25, 2020

I was hooked.
»

Reading time: ~15 minutes.

gulp-sass v2 was released today!

In itself, this is not a big change as this is simply a wrapper for node-sass which uses libsass so, while this version is a complete rewrite this is not the important news. The important news is that it ships with node-sass v3 which is using libsass 3.2.2.
»

We software developers live in a time with an
inexhaustible supply
of methodologies, libraries, tools and ideas. Evidence for or against
specific ideas is sparse: Gathering trustworthy, controlled data in
such complex environments is crazy expensive.
»

Hey everyone,

We are organising a NixOs meetup in London the 21st of April at 7pm, in space generously provided by Mozilla London (it’s a really cool space!).
Tickets are limited and you can grab them on Eventbrite.
»

Everyone I know who has ever used
QuickCheck in anger cannot live without it.
»

Reading time: ~20 minutes.

Last year I wrote a blog post on my personal website (you can see it here Gulp by example ) showing what gulp was and making a demo project using it.
Since then, the team behind it did a lot of work on v4 of gulp which, while not released as of the writing of the post, is stable enough to be used.
»

As a fairly technical agency we do occasionally need help from our
fantastic freelance designer to get a good looking product. You can
read her take on design rules
here.
»

Reading time: ~10 minutes.

Writing anything substantial in JavaScript is hard because JavaScript
lacks many of the tools programmers expect these days, like a coherent
and strong type system.
»

Reading time: ~15 minutes.

There are many implementations for running code in a way pioneered by Heroku which is basically this:
»

We recently talked to some customers who are interested in finding images with similar colours in the context of fashion. There are several known solutions for this, and even some hosted services that do it for you.
»

Inspired by a recent post on reddit about Git’s first commit I checked out the first commits for a variety of projects. Git’s first commit contains a concise, fantastic description of what Git is and how it works. How do other projects compare?
»