The recent release of TypeScript 4.0 offers a smorgasbord of improvements including improvements to coding editor experience, build scenarios and support for variadic tuple types. Let’s take a closer look at some of these improvements a developer can make use of in this latest release.

In the previous architecture spotlight entry, we discussed Event Sourcing and illustrated the concept with a simple banking account example. We laid out many of its pros and cons to help readers decide if the pattern would be useful to them.

An article on 2nd Generation JavaScript Frameworks & Libraries: beyond Angular, React, and Vue! recaps Geertjan Wielenga’s talk on the evolution of JavaScript and the influence of the enterprise in recent years. Wielenga spoke of the pioneers of JavaScript frameworks and libraries including Dojo (1.x), Mootools, Extjs, jQuery, and YUI which were among the first libraries to address the needs of the developer.

Today, many software projects rely on some form of iterative software development lifecycle (SDLC) to incrementally deliver features to their users. A feature is identified, analyzed, designed, scoped, implemented, tested, and ultimately shipped to users – and this cycle is repeated for all features throughout a project’s lifetime.

Your team realizes that testing is valuable. Your team creates tests for already completed features.

Your software development team released an MVP application into production. The application only had a few features and the codebase is far from perfect, but there are big plans for the future! Your team presses on, adding features and your user base continues to grow.

Now that we’ve demystified smart contracts and better understand what they are and how they work, let’s build our own contract on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Because smart contracts are computer programs at their core, many of the concepts that we’ll use to build a basic contract will seem familiar.

Smart contracts are often described as a transformative new technology that borders on magic, able to remove third-parties and monetary risk alike from business deals using the power of the blockchain. The autonomous execution and enforcement of an agreement may sound like something out of a Harry Potter novel, but the maturation of blockchain-based programming techniques have made smart contracts more of a reality than ever.  Many types of business transactions today require intermediate parties to facilitate the exchange of goods or services.

It’s been a year since I last talked about my development environment. Many things remain the same: I’m using neovim, zsh, and tmux.