Imagine starting your day realising that someone found an outdated dependency in your project, upgraded it, opened a pull request with a detailed description and the test suite had already been run. All that was left was for you to do is carry out a code review and hit that merge button! That someone is Dependabot.

Save time writing release notes!

What’s the worst that could happen?

But we are hackers and hackers have black terminals with green font colors ~ John Nunemaker

This is the second in a series of posts on useful bash aliases and shell customisations that developers here at Talis use for their own personal productivity. In this post I describe how I configured my shell to automatically change my terminal theme when I connect to a remote machine in any of our AWS accounts.

It turns out that Docker has an internal Domain Name Service (DNS). Did you know? It’s new to me too! I learnt the hard way while using a VPN.

You’ve branched off a branch. Unfortunately the original branch is not ready to be merged and you need to promote your branch to a first class citizen, branched off of master.

However, when you raise the pull request for the second branch, you get all the changes from the first! Of course it does - you’ve branched off a branch!

You could wait till the original branch is ready, but alternatively, you can use git rebase to help you.

This post delves into some of the pitfalls encountered when working with JavaScript promises, suggests some improvements and looks at a brief glimpse of the future of asynchronous programming in JavaScript.

This was first presented at one of our internal tech team talks and encouraged our CTO to rethink the coding of our latest JavaScript project here at Talis.

But we are hackers and hackers have black terminals with green font colors ~ John Nunemaker

This post is the first in a series on useful bash aliases and shell customisations that developers here at Talis use for their own personal productivity. In this post I introduce an alias I wrote called awslookup that allows me retrieve information about ec2 instances across multiple aws accounts.

Authors need editors to catch mistakes. It is human nature that one cannot adequately proof-read one’s own work. Authors of software need the same assistance as authors of novels to achieve the goals of the software organization. ~ Smarter Collaborator

As the statement above suggests, humans are not all that good at self-reviewing their work. It doesn’t matter if it’s written as code or plain English, a review by a peer will at the very least raise questions, but more than likely identify errors.

Before I dive into Talis’ approach to code reviews, I should first briefly introduce what a code review is, and why it’s beneficial in the development lifecycle.

Good design is a language, and when everyone is speaking the same language, that’s when things get done. ~ Arjun Narayanan