General

Introducing This Dot's PAMstack Services - Process Improvement Consulting for Technology Organizations

Published Apr 13, 2020

Updated Oct 9, 2023

3 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

During these challenging and uncertain times, many companies are taking additional measures to review their operational processes, and determine how they can act most efficiently, while maintaining concern and focus for their employees.

Development team leadership is looking for a way to ensure that their employees remain engaged and productive, while developers demand more clarity and understanding to help them perform despite the anxieties currently impacting every global industry.

Now is the time for leadership to develop clear plans of action not only for the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic, but looking forward as well- to when developers come back to their workplaces, and a sense of relative normalcy returns.

To help support teams, eager to audit their operations, and implement more clear and stable processes for leading their teams, This Dot Labs is now proud to offer a new resource through the PAMstack.

WHAT IS THE PAMSTACK?

In short, the PAMstack (Process, Abstraction, & Mentorship) is a modern framework for creating sustainable development teams.

It is not a list of rigid and inflexible rules, nor does it rely on mountains of documentation. Instead, the PAMstack empowers developer teams to streamline their processes, promote workplace inclusion, and better outfit their projects to promote collaboration.

Teams do this by auditing their processes to incrementally simplify complicated workflows that rely on personal excellence above teamwork, migrate their technologies to leverage highly documented modern web tools, and create intentional mentorship programs to invest in team longevity.

By implementing this customizable program, teams will expect to reduce project and hiring budgets, increase productivity, mitigate workplace stressors, and better diversify their workplaces both demographically, and technologically.

WHAT DOES THIS DOT LABS INCLUDE IN ITS PAMSTACK SERVICES?

Leaders who are interested in exploring how the PAMstack will transform their developer teams are encouraged to contact hi@thisdotlabs.co to schedule their free 1-hour process audit with one of our expert PAMstack architects.

In this session, we will explore how your team can take advantage of the PAMstack, including sample process plans, checklists, and documentation; 1:1 mentorship, team workshops, leadership development, staff augmentation, architectural reviews, and the support of This Dot’s large network of industry leaders.

If you are not a team leader, but are interested in learning more about how to implement PAMstack principles in your own processes, we have made many of our resources, and documentation available free on our For Developers page.

There, you can access free workflow checklists, review example process documentation, explore leading technologies, and check out tips for introducing mentorship programs to your workplace.

To learn more about the PAMstack from one of its lead architects, Rob Ocel, you can listen to this talk, or check out our new website: thepamstack.com!

And if you’re ready to begin your journey with the PAMstack, schedule a complimentary process audit today by contacting us at hi@thisdot.co!

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

About the author(s)

This Dot

Tips for Better Time Management as a Software Engineer

Tips for Better Time Management as a Software Engineer In today's ever-growing software landscape of tools and experience to gain, we can find ourselves lost wanting to do more, yet feeling like we don't have enough hours in the day to accomplish everything we want. This problem is all too common in every level of industry, and as software engineers we can find ourselves racing to finish multiple things yet never actually reaching the finish line with anything. If by chance we do, we're often burnt out and ready for vacation (sometimes after a few days). Sadly, we all can't be Elon Musk, but we can begin to fix our habits and patterns to feel more like a genius. Why Is Time Management Important? As professionals in any fields, it's important that we execute on our work in a consistent way that helps us not only feel *productive*, but also feel like we're helping achieve business goals as well as personal growth goals. Taking an example straight from my own life, I found myself mentally exhausted trying to keep up with everything in my life - my job, personal projects, and my life goals. It seemed like I had so much going on, but my fatal flaw was the fact that keeping myself busy with so much didn't make me feel accomplished. Something had to change. Benefits of Proper Time Management Simply put, there are no downsides to better time management. The act of time management is a great key to our success in whatever we do. While it's as simple as just doing it, focus and consistency are needed to really be successful. Because we live in a world where the speed of business and technology is increasing, being decisive about priorities is even more important. Where we fail is when we try to make snap decisions especially for important tasks that require our full attention. Not only does it take focus and consistency to succeed, but when a person knows what they're doing for the week, day, or hour, they can better focus on tasks and feel better about whatever they're doing. There's a sense of clarity that comes as a result of having a single focus on one thing and executing on it, even if it's not to completion. Helpful Tips for Better Time Management Important Being a master of your time can be a difficult task at first, but with some grit and determination, paving the road to success can become easier. Say you need to meet a deadline for a project with a release in a few days. How can we make our lives easier in a short period of time? 1. Redefine Goals and Expectations The first step is to write down all you tasks including goals, milestones, or whatever you use to describe large bodies of work. This will paint a clear picture of what is and what is *not* a priority. Wins from doing this include: - framing your to-dos to better execute them - freeing your mind from trying to remember why you're doing something - strategizing how to best execute tasks *Pro tip: adding goals and activities you're already currently working on to this list helps make sure nothing is missed.* This doesn't have to be a complicated step with each goal or task being general. In the next section, we'll see how to be effective with this list. 2. Prioritize Goals and Actionable Tasks Now we have a list of things to accomplish and activities already invested in, but we haven't figured out what to perform first. The best way we can prioritize these items is to place value on them. Value can be added to tasks by determing how much of an impact one task can make over the other. We can even timebox them to further increase that value. Ask youself these questions to categorize tasks: 1. Is it urgent and important? 2. Is it important, but not as urgent? 3. Is it urgent, but not important? 4. Is it neither urgent nor important? Remember urgency often has a time limit, and importance can be specific to you or to a group of persons. A couple of examples look like this: 1. Release candidate to deploy to production by 3/1/2021. Urgent because there's a due date, and important because it affects the team and/or business. 2. Technical task to unblock a portion of work. Doesn't have a time limit, but could help unblock yourself or another developer. 3. Make a Plan and Stick to It Lastly, and this may be the hardest part about time management: consistency is another one of those building blocks to success and it's absolutely critical that all of the effort so far does not crash down on us. This one really comes down to knowing how best you work. Whether it's waking up at 4:30 am to get your mind ready for the day or working out to keep your body active, figure out your motivation for the work being done and put it into your schedule. What you gain from doing this is: - a clear visualization of what's being worked on for the day or week - what's up next on your agenda - *when you'll have your breaks to recharge and finish strong* A note on breaks: developers write code, check processes, do code reviews, plan solutions to unique problems, suggest and articulate solutions, and the list goes on. Without scheduled breaks, we'd be on the fast track to burn out before the day's out. Make a plan solid by strategizing about the plan and how you'll *stick to it*. It makes a world of difference to set your work space away from your bedroom, or to work at the office or a coffee shop. Prepare healthy meals ahead of time so you're not skipping meals or eating junk. Workout during the week because your body is a temple, and the mind needs the body like the body needs a fully functioning mind. Tools to Help Structure Your Time As stated before, write things down and block out your time, so you know what you can and can't commit to. Here are a few tools that I use to get me through the day feeling well-accomplished: iCal - makes it easy to import multiple calendars, from one or more email addresses, into a single calendar view. Google Calendar - you won't get the same importing features as iCal, but their interface makes it easy to add shared calendars. If you can find a 3rd-party mail client that offers the same flexibility as iCal, I'd recommend that for the single calendar view. Notion - Notion has changed the way I operate entirely. You can use the free version personally and for work. It just requires that you use one email address per workspace. With Notion, you can: - Take general notes - Keep a work log - Generate to a table of tasks - Set reminders for tasks - Sort tasks into views - Use user-built templates. Some you can buy while others provide instructions on how to make them your own. If Notion isn't the right fit for you, Evernote is another really great tool for assembling thoughts into books, articles, and notes. It also features templates more than Notion does. Conclusion In the earlier example of a deadline for a release candidate, it may feel like there's no time left before that deadline rolls around. That sinking feeling like you're running out of time is the reason you should manage your expectations, priorities, and time. Only good things can come from taking back your time and focusing it. At the end of the day, you can look back and feel a sense of freedom. Be good to future you!...

Mar 8, 2021

6 mins

TipsGeneralMentorshipSoftware Engineer

My Career Roadmap

Every developer has their own unique roadmap. I love hearing these stories as they’re constant reminders that there is no right way. Anyone can become a successful developer as long as they have the passion for it. I’ll be sharing my roadmap in hopes that someone also realizes that there are multiple ways to be part of the programming world. My journey started when I attended a junior college in an effort to complete the prerequisites for a Biochemistry degree. I actually got far enough to start taking Organic Chemistry courses. However, my heart wasn’t in it. I found it boring and dreaded anything related to those science classes. I did find it cool that I could recognize some of the fancy ingredients in a shampoo. It just wasn’t what I connected with. I knew that something had to change. I was on track to transfer to a four year university in less than two years. I was always interested in computers and thought about programming. I still don’t know why I was drawn to that: maybe social media made it look cool? The dilemma was to either continue or take a risk by starting a whole new career. I didn’t want to spend more time at junior college, so I needed to make a hard decision: either continue with Biochemistry or drop it completely to pursue programming, but still transfer within the estimated year. I probably would have chosen to experiment with both at the same time if I had realized this a couple of years prior. However, I ended up changing majors within a week. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. My first programming class felt a bit scary. The building was run down and cold. The room was cramped. There were only two females (including myself). The course wasn’t hard or discriminating against genders but it probably felt that way due to being completely new to the field and not knowing anyone. It didn’t discourage me from programming. In fact, I still remember typing up my first Hello World program. It was the feeling of writing code that made me realize that I was on the right track. Luckily, the junior college had opened up the new STEM building a year later. This really made the place more welcoming. It was actually pretty cool. There were outlets everywhere! A dream for programmers that we take for granted. One of the courses that I took was Internet Programming. This was a turning point for me. My professor recommended that I participate in the local hackathon that was coming up soon. He suggested forming a team with the two other females in class. I never once thought he was discriminating. I honestly believe that he saw potential in all of us but we were lacking confidence in a male-dominated world. We participated in the hackathon as a female group. It was my first time working with a team and presenting our project to the public. We didn’t win any awards, but it provided some of the confidence that I was lacking. I finally understood that it didn’t matter what gender you are. I found a love of programming and wanted to be one of the best. I ended up getting recruited for a local internship through the hackathon. I was able to learn about realistic expectations when building a project for a client. The lead developer was also very open to teaching a complete newbie. This is where I learned the basics for web development. It was this type of support that helped shape my career. I graduated from junior college with an associates degree in Chemistry and transferred the next semester. The one regret that I do have in my career is the university that I chose. It didn’t have the best resources for the Computer Science students. The classes were boring and most of the professors didn't seem to care. If you weren’t on the game research cohort, you were just another student passing through. During this time, I got a chance to be part of a research team. However, I decided to accept an internship instead. It was another difficult decision as both had great opportunities. I still think that the internship was the best route as it helped me later on. The internship only lasted for the summer. I learned Polymer during this time. The project was my first deployment and it was used by the city. It was also another great confidence booster. I returned to school with the goal to find my first job before graduation. Truthfully, it was very discouraging, even with my internship experiences. Most companies wanted developers with years in programming. They really don’t make it easy for junior developers. I’m almost positive that I placed over 100 applications. When I did get a response, it was a decline. I also attended the career fair that the university organized. That’s where I found the company that gave me a job offer. I started working for them after graduation. This led to web development in the Drupal world for a little over 2 years. It was a small company but provided development growth. I learned the importance of quality assurance and time management. I also acquired the skill to advocate for higher priority tickets. The most important lesson was that a project can only thrive with a unified team and proper documentation. However, the company had a tremendous downsize due to the pandemic. I was once again on the job hunt. Fortunately, the connections I made during the summer internship helped me find a job at This Dot. There was still an interview process, which I passed due to all the career choices that were made. I’m very excited to be here. I’m working with LitElement projects and more structured work environments. It really is a big difference from a very small company. I’m now pursuing the path of being a mentor, a dream that I had since my first internship. I’m working on improving a mentorship program and making sure my mentee has all the support she needs. I barely have a bit over 3 years of work experience. The time went by very quickly and I’m still excited to be programming. I can’t wait to see where my roadmap will be in the next upcoming years. Tweet me your favorite moment in your roadmap!...

Feb 2, 2021

4 mins

CareerMentorship

Announcing July JavaScript Marathon - Free, online training!

Join us July 22nd, 2020 for our next JavaScript Marathon! JavaScript Marathon is a full day of free, online courses on Angular, React, Vue, RxJS, and Web Performance. Come learn about some of the leading web development technologies, and concepts! Stay for one training, or stick around for the whole day! No two sessions will be the same! --- Featuring Shawn Wang @ 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT In this session we will learn how to build a fullstack serverless React + GraphQL app from scratch with authentication, storage, and multiplayer realtime collaboration, all atop infinitely scalable AWS components, with AWS Amplify! It's never been this easy to go from idea to prototype, and each piece will be livecoded in front of your very eyes! --- Featuring Michael Hladky @ 12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT The async pipe is boring! Understand the guts of Angulars change detection and why zone.js is your biggest enemy. Learn the tricks on template bindings, component rendering, and where you pay the biggest price. As a cutting edge demo, you will understand how to analyze blocking UIs over flame charts and how to avoid them. In the end, you will be able to get zone-less performance even in zone-full Angular applications! --- Featuring Nathan Walker @ 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT During this introduction to Nativescript, you’ll get a brief overview of what Nativescript is and how it works. You’ll also learn how to create a TypeScript, Angular, Vue, and React based app, + so much more! --- Featuring Cecelia Martinez @ 3:30pm - 4:30pm EDT Looking to add testing to your skill set or just feel more confident pushing to production? In this beginner-level talk, we will walk through the process of installing, configuring, and writing a critical-path test using Cypress. Written in JavaScript and built on the popular Mocha and Chai libraries, the free and open-source Cypress Test Runner gets you up to speed with end-to-end testing fast. We will also cover general testing strategies for beginners, including how to decide what to test and how to ensure your test suite is effective. --- Featuring Jesse Tomchak @ 5:00pm - 6:00pm EDT Setting up user authorization and authentication can be a minefield of security practices, token verification, valid callback urls, salt hashes, and more. Now take all those struggles and sprinkle them over serverless functions! When all we want to do is get past the login page to our actual application. We'll walk through setting up secure oAuth with AWS Lambda functions, covering common pitfalls, so that you can get back to the fun part of your project. --- Tune in next month for another full day of JavaScript Marathon! Need private trainings for your company? If you would like to learn more about how you can leverage This Dot’s expertise to upskill your team, and reinvigorate your developers with new knowledge about the web’s leading development technologies, visit the trainings page....

Jul 8, 2020

4 mins

EnterpriseGeneralJavaScriptTraining

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

As web developers, we're often working with data from external sources like APIs we don't control or user inputs submitted to our backends. We can't always rely on this data to take the form we expect, and we can encounter unexpected errors when it deviates from expectations. But with the Zod library, we can define what our data ought to look like and parse the incoming data against those defined schemas. This lets us work with that data confidently, or to quickly throw an error when it isn't correct. Why use Zod? TypeScript is great for letting us define the shape of our data in our code. It helps us write more correct code the first time around by warning us if we are doing something we shouldn't. But TypeScript can't do everything for us. For example, we can define a variable as a string or a number, but we can't say "a string that starts with user_id_ and is 20 characters long" or "an integer between 1 and 5". There are limits to how much TypeScript can narrow down our data for us. Also, TypeScript is a tool for us developers. When we compile our code, our types are not available to the vanilla JavaScript. JavaScript can't validate that the data we actually use in our code matches what we thought we'd get when we wrote our TypeScript types unless you're willing to manually write code to perform those checks. This is where we can reach for a tool like Zod. With Zod, we can write data schemas. These schemas, in the simplest scenarios, look very much like TypeScript types. But we can do more with Zod than we can with TypeScript alone. Zod schemas let us create additional rules for data parsing and validation. A 20-character string that starts with user_id_? It's z.string().startsWith('user_id_').length(20). An integer between 1 and 5 inclusive? It's z.number().int().gte(1).lte(5). Zod's primitives give us many extra functions to be more specific about *exactly* what data we expect. Unlike TypeScript, Zod schemas aren't removed on compilation to JavaScript—we still have access to them! If our app receives some data, we can verify that it matches the expected shape by passing it to your Zod schema's parse function. You'll either get back your data in exactly the shape you defined in your schema, or Zod will give you an error to tell you what was wrong. Zod schemas aren't a replacement for TypeScript; rather, they are an excellent complement. Once we've defined our Zod schema, it's simple to derive a TypeScript type from it and to use that type as we normally would. But when we really need to be sure our data conforms to the schema, we can always parse the data with our schema for that extra confidence. Defining Data Schemas Zod schemas are the variables that define our expectations for the shape of our data, validate those expectations, and transform the data if necessary to match our desired shape. It's easy to start with simple schemas, and to add complexity as required. Zod provides different functions that represent data structures and related validation options, which can be combined to create larger schemas. In many cases, you'll probably be building a schema for a data object with properties of some primitive type. For example, here's a schema that would validate a JavaScript object representing an order for a pizza: ` Zod provides a number of primitives for defining schemas that line up with JavaScript primitives: string, number, bigint, boolean, date, symbol, undefined, and null. It also includes primitives void, any, unknown, and never for additional typing information. In addition to basic primitives, Zod can define object, array, and other native data structure schemas, as well as schemas for data structures not natively part of JavaScript like tuple and enum. The documentation contains considerable detail on the available data structures and how to use them. Parsing and Validating Data with Schemas With Zod schemas, you're not only telling your program what data should look like; you're also creating the tools to easily verify that the incoming data matches the schema definitions. This is where Zod really shines, as it greatly simplifies the process of validating data like user inputs or third party API responses. Let's say you're writing a website form to register new users. At a minimum, you'll need to make sure the new user's email address is a valid email address. For a password, we'll ask for something at least 8 characters long and including one letter, one number, and one special character. (Yes, this is not really the best way to write strong passwords; but for the sake of showing off how Zod works, we're going with it.) We'll also ask the user to confirm their password by typing it twice. First, let's create a Zod schema to model these inputs: ` So far, this schema is pretty basic. It's only making sure that whatever the user types as an email is an email, and it's checking that the password is at least 8 characters long. But it is *not* checking if password and confirmPassword match, nor checking for the complexity requirements. Let's enhance our schema to fix that! ` By adding refine with a custom validation function, we have been able to verify that the passwords match. If they don't, parsing will give us an error to let us know that the data was invalid. We can also chain refine functions to add checks for our password complexity rules: ` Here we've chained multiple refine functions. You could alternatively use superRefine, which gives you even more fine grained control. Now that we've built out our schema and added refinements for extra validation, we can parse some user inputs. Let's see two test cases: one that's bound to fail, and one that will succeed. ` There are two main ways we can use our schema to validate our data: parse and safeParse. The main difference is that parse will throw an error if validation fails, while safeParse will return an object with a success property of either true or false, and either a data property with your parsed data or an error property with the details of a ZodError explaining why the parsing failed. In the case of our example data, userInput2 will parse just fine and return the data for you to use. But userInput1 will create a ZodError listing all of the ways it has failed validation. ` ` We can use these error messages to communicate to the user how they need to fix their form inputs if validation fails. Each error in the list describes the validation failure and gives us a human readable message to go with it. You'll notice that the validation errors for checking for a valid email and for checking password length have a lot of details, but we've got three items at the end of the error list that don't really tell us anything useful: just a custom error of Invalid input. The first is from our refine checking if the passwords match, and the second two are from our refine functions checking for password complexity (numbers and special characters). Let's modify our refine functions so that these errors are useful! We'll add our own error parameters to customize the message we get back and the path to the data that failed validation. ` Now, our error messages from failures in refine are informative! You can figure out which form fields aren't validating from the path, and then display the messages next to form fields to let the user know how to remedy the error. ` By giving our refine checks a custom path and message, we can make better use of the returned errors. In this case, we can highlight specific problem form fields for the user and give them the message about what is wrong. Integrating with TypeScript Integrating Zod with TypeScript is very easy. Using z.infer<typeof YourSchema> will allow you to avoid writing extra TypeScript types that merely reflect the intent of your Zod schemas. You can create a type from any Zod schema like so: ` Using a TypeScript type derived from a Zod schema does *not* give you any extra level of data validation at the type level beyond what TypeScript is capable of. If you create a type from z.string.min(3).max(20), the TypeScript type will still just be string. And when compiled to JavaScript, even that will be gone! That's why you still need to use parse/safeParse on incoming data to validate it before proceeding as if it really does match your requirements. A common pattern with inferring types from Zod schemas is to use the same name for both. Because the schema is a variable, there's no name conflict if the type uses the same name. However, I find that this can lead to confusing situations when trying to import one or the other—my personal preference is to name the Zod schema with Schema at the end to make it clear which is which. Conclusion Zod is an excellent tool for easily and confidently asserting that the data you're working with is exactly the sort of data you were expecting. It gives us the ability to assert at runtime that we've got what we wanted, and allows us to then craft strategies to handle what happens if that data is wrong. Combined with the ability to infer TypeScript types from Zod schemas, it lets us write and run more reliable code with greater confidence....

Nov 15, 2024

7 mins

JavaScriptZod

Let's innovate together!

We're ready to be your trusted technical partners in your digital innovation journey.

Whether it's modernization or custom software solutions, our team of experts can guide you through best practices and how to build scalable, performant software that lasts.

Introducing This Dot's PAMstack Services - Process Improvement Consulting for Technology Organizations

This Dot

You might also like

Tips for Better Time Management as a Software Engineer

My Career Roadmap

Announcing July JavaScript Marathon - Free, online training!

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

Tips for Better Time Management as a Software Engineer

My Career Roadmap

Announcing July JavaScript Marathon - Free, online training!

Introduction to Zod for Data Validation