We do a lot of software projects at Xebia Software Development. We work most of the time at our client’s location, in their teams. Together we improve the quality of their software, their process, and engineering culture. As such, we’ve seen a lot of projects play out. Most of these efforts succeeded but some failed. Recently we did a retrospective to learn from these experiences. The result is this opinionated list of characteristics of successful software projects.
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Writing boring code is not fun. Especially if that code is just a derivative of some data. You should generate it instead! A great example is to generate your HTTP client code from an API definition. This is actually very easy to do with a recent node version and requires almost no extra dependencies. In this post I will show you how to take a JSON schema definition and generate some validation logic from that.

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We use flow from Facebook to run type checking on our codebase. When you run ‘flow status’ it starts a flow server in the background and keeps it running. That way after the first run the results of each next run are almost instant. The only thing currently lacking is a watch mode, but there is a nice trick you can use.
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React Native is a technology to develop mobile apps on iOS and Android that have a near-native feel, all from one codebase. It is a very promising technology, but the documentation on testing can use some more depth. There are some pointers in the docs but they leave you wanting more. In this blog post I will show you how to use XCUITest to record and run automated UI tests on iOS.
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