Written on
July 30, 2015
by
Ashton Thomas
What was it that led you to a career in Computer Engineering?
It’s funny because throughout school, I was involved in business and entrepreneurship, more than tech. However, I found myself a technology business rather quickly as there are so many possibilities with web-based products. I’ve observed a common problem that many entrepreneurs face: the difficulty finding technical resources that stay involved throughout the inherently iterative process of building a technology company. I didn’t want to have dependencies outside of my control, so I took the technical skills I learned in school and expanded on them as best I could. Continue…
Written on
July 15, 2015
by
Daniel Lavin
What was it that led you to a career in Computer Engineering?
My path to Engineering was definitely unconventional. I double majored in marketing and commercial real estate in college and my first job after graduation was as a commercial real estate broker here in Chicago. I spent the better part of a year making about 75 cold calls a day and knew pretty quickly that it wasn’t for me.
From there I moved to Florida to work for a company that was focused on building and managing web-based loyalty programs. Sound familiar? While I was there, I did a lot of account and product management type work and eventually became interested in how things were built from a technical perspective. Continue…
Written on
June 22, 2015
by
Ethan Gunderson
What was it that led you to a career in Computer Engineering?
When I was little, probably 3rd or 4th grade, we had to a draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. I’m pretty sure I drew a picture of myself at a computer. My art skills aren’t the best though, so it might have looked more like me as lumberjack or something. I’ve pretty much always known that I wanted to work in a computer related field. Growing up, I was the first of my friends to get a computer, and we spent an unhealthy amount of time messing around with it. Continue…
Written on
June 15, 2015
by
Harrison Strowd
What was it that led you to a career in Computer Engineering?
Honestly, my path to a career in Computer Engineering began at an early age. The ball first started rolling in middle school with my introduction to Lego’s Mindstorms. This really brought programming to life for me. These toys could be programmed to move, push, and lift stuff. I found that so cool. Around the same time, I also took my first official CS class which really cemented my interests in this area and led me to continue studying software development throughout high school, college, and on. Continue…
Written on
May 23, 2015
by
Shaker Islam
We use Elasticsearch here at Belly to implement this thing we call “search.” It comes in handy for a few things, such as analyzing your logs via ELK (which stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, & Kibana) or just trying to figure out which businesses in Chicago have the word “pizza” in the name. At its core, Elasticsearch is just Apache Lucene. But it has a lot of other desirable features, like highly-available node clustering, aggregate search, and a JSON Query DSL.
But interacting with Elasticsearch on an application level is easier said than done. While Search Lite is simple to use in development, constructing meaningful queries can get complicated real quick. Since Elasticsearch isn’t as common as MySQL or Postgres, the odds are that other people on your team won’t know the internals of Elasticsearch. And that makes writing readable code really difficult.
Continue…
Written on
March 9, 2015
by
Shay Howe
The debate between using mixins or extends in Sass has been heating up recently. From the surface it appears they both provide solid benefits in helping us write consistent and modular code. However, the critics are out and extends specifically have come under fire. But why?
(If you’re unsure what mixins and extends are, or the Sass preprocessor, I’d recommend researching them before before continuing here.)
The Argument
There are a handful of arguments against extends, the most popular include:
- Extends don’t allow arguments
- Extends don’t work within media queries
- Extends, when nested, can extend unintended code
- Extends group the compiled CSS based on reused declarations, not on how the code is contextually written
Fair enough, those are good arguments, and mixins will solve for every one of them. That said, extends won’t duplicate our declarations where mixins will. And with mixins, that can be an enormous amount of duplication. Extends, on the other hand, will duplicate our selectors, combine them with other selectors, and rearrange them so they appear with the necessary declarations.
So this begs the question: if mixins and extends both have some amount of duplication, which is best?
Continue…
