This Old App

Vue, Vuex, Auth, and State Management

Don and Randy continue their discussion about the business plans in the Big Idea Gator Business Plan Competition, this time about the best entries and how the competition played out. Coconuts!

Don brings in a few examples from an upcoming Big Idea Gator Business Plan Competition in which he's playing the role of a judge. We discuss the importance of good writing, identifying the problem, and setting reasonable goals and metrics to give folks the notion you have some idea what you're doing. In Part 1, we discuss the weakest entries before tackling the better ones in Part 2.

Don asked Randy about what he's working on, lately, and Randy exclaimed, "nothing fun," which actually turns out not to be true. Randy details the additional mix of people, communication, and risk management around mature application development and it becomes the setting for a larger-picture discussion on how things change with app dev as you age.

Randy pitches to Don an approach for a CMS project and then rifs on the cool new toy he recently purchased for the kitchen: A sous vide cooking device.

This week we take a look at the state of a few hyped technologies and see where they really are in terms of usefulness, adoption, and long-term viability. Don thinks VR will never go mainstream and Randy wants a drone to bring him something, ANYTHING, right now.

Don takes Randy along for the ride of his latest applications using Microsoft's Power App platform. They discuss building an application that uses Twilio, Trello, Flow, Power Apps, OneDrive, Adaptive Cards, and Microsoft Teams without much code, if any.

Randy's been approached, both at his job and from an external firm, about the need for a CMS. The old stalwarts of Wordpress and Drupal don't seem to work, but the idea of a Static Site Generator and persisted content does. Randy and Don discuss the new products out there that can potentially serve both needs.

Randy has been working on Twilio a bit since the team last worked on the Chasms project and updates Don on some of the interesting features Twilio has brought to market. In addition, they discuss a few gotchas about SMS pricing that might needlessly cost developers a few extra bucks.

Don has been hearing Randy tell him to quit coding so much and finally does something about it: He decides to build an app without writing a line of code (but not delegating it to someone else) by using Microsoft's Power Apps platform. This week, we discuss everything about PowerApps and how this might be THE FUTURE!

Chris Coyier recently posted a tweet regarding a front-end developer he knew that "could not build a website." Is this strange? Shouldn't every developer that claims front-end skills be able to prop up a basic site?

This week, we shall rant! The term "Clean Code" is a vague and irresponsible phrase to use regarding programming and Randy will have nothing of it. It's time Uncle Bob's cute money-making catch phrase was put to pasture.

Following a tweet from Ben Hong @bencodezen about whether people need to master JavaScript before using a framework, Don and Randy discuss how they have used, shipped, and been paid to use framework and applications many times without knowing the base language beforehand.

Don and Randy discuss the changes that ageing has on their development skills and focus, how to combat it (or adapt to it), and stay somewhat off the "old person joke" train... sort of.

Randy reacts to a Tweetstorm about Lambda School using his former experiences as a bootcamp teacher to add some perspective