If you are using MongoDB and an Object Data Modeling library like Mongoose, or Mongoid, you may find yourselves in situations where your queries are taking a little too long. Come Aggregations to your rescue!

Say, your team is working on a number of features, and there is a steady stream of Pull Requests at any given time. The likelihood and complexity of merge conflicts depends both on the size of your team, and the scope of your features. In this podcast, I discuss a few options to mitigate merge conflicts.

If you want complete control over your servers, you would choose (something like) Amazon EC2 and start with creating a new Machine Image. But, what if your interest primarily lied in building your app, and solving your user's problems ASAP, and you didn't want to spend much, if any, time on setting up and configuring servers?

When you get started on a new project, it is natural to feel a tad overwhelmed. After all, it may be a new team, new technology stack, new processes, and new business problems - so it is alright to feel a little restless. But there is a way to feel at home by the end of Day 1.  

If it takes you 5 minutes to test 10 lines of code, there is a problem. If it takes you 3 minutes to bounce your (local) server, and that's the only way for you to test your code, there is another problem. 

Whether you are joining a new team, or a new developer is joining your team, the expectation is quite the same - "a good quality codebase that will help us understand the product without having to bug the rest of the team". How can we work towards building such a codebase?

You cannot afford to make Backwards Compatibility an after thought. As your system grows, and your user base grows, you are going to continually add new features and services, and some of them will require fundamental changes to your semantics and data structure. Given that, backwards compatibility can get rather challenging but there are steps you can take to mitigate potential issues.

(Part 1) Separation of concerns is important to keep your native mobile app modular and becomes especially important when your app integrates with 100s of APIs. You want to ensure that your app is resilient to changes to the API Spec. 

(Part 2) Separation of concerns is important to keep your native mobile app modular and becomes especially important when your app integrates with 100s of APIs. You want to ensure that your app is resilient to changes to the API Spec. 

Whether you are designing a NoSQL Database or a traditional RDBMS Database, one way to optimize to ensure faster retrieval is to denormalize but that's not the best (or even the first) solution. You want to try out a few other things before resorting to denormalization.