I had a friend tell me the other day that they figured out how to use an API. What they explained to me they instantiated class objects as required, but then they were manipulating properties and/or using functions that were prefixed with the _ character. As you may or may not know, there is an implicit contract dictating that properties that have names beginning with _ shall not be accessed, altered, or even invoked. I believe that this implicit contract isn’t always sufficient and it isn’t defensive programming. People, like my friend, can and do break the implicit contract when consuming a library.

In this post, I’ll be discussing some tools I’ve found and used for different projects of mine. Why would we want to seed a database? There are typically a couple of reasons to seed a database. First, having data in your database is typically helpful for tests that need to hit the database. The second reason to seed a database is to show off a project, for example, a portfolio piece or an internal demonstration of something you developed for your company. There are two categories of tools I’m listing. A data-oriented tool, and a few avatars tools.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was under the pressure of time, I decided to attempt to get webpack-dev-server (WDS) running. I failed miserably, and moved on instead of wasting time on the project. Now again, I find myself in need of a tool to speed up development time. Last week I did the research and today I’m sharing for posterity’s sake. Additionally at the time of this article webpack-livereload-plugin is not compatible with webpack 4 that was just released a few days ago. The only downside to this configuration is I cannot use socket.io to communicate between nodemon’s server and WDS’s client.

As a former IT professional, the mantra of backups has been drilled into me. I feel that my fellow software engineers can fall into a false sense of security because we are trained to use a version control system (VCS) like git as part of our development workflow.